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Using TypeScript with React

simonknott.de

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Re: Using TypeScript with React

#3

Post by hki99 »

During my internship we've built a large prototype using React+Typescript, and here are some of my key take aways from it:

  - Quite often when using unreleased APIs, you turn to using "any" all over the place.
  - Development time is slower than writing in regular JS/React. This started to become a major issue due to the nature of our project being a prototype (fast iterations on ideas and features). 
  - Lots of frustration when a package doesn't have types (although most major ones do have them).
Otherwise it has been a joy writing the application, and it does "document" your components significantly better.

Re: Using TypeScript with React

#4

Post by latchkey »

hki99 wrote: post #3

During my internship we've built a large prototype using React+Typescript, and here are some of my key take aways from it: - Quite often when using unreleased APIs, you turn to using "any" all over the place. - Development time is slower than writing in regular JS/React. This started to become a major issue due to the nature of our project being a prototype (fast iterations on ideas and features). - Lots of frustrati…

Development time isn't slower when you factor in all the bugs it saves you from dealing with down the road when you're either wonder what is the type of an object or why something isn't working during runtime that a compiler could have caught.

Re: Using TypeScript with React

#6

Post by altschuler »

hki99 wrote: post #3

During my internship we've built a large prototype using React+Typescript, and here are some of my key take aways from it: - Quite often when using unreleased APIs, you turn to using "any" all over the place. - Development time is slower than writing in regular JS/React. This started to become a major issue due to the nature of our project being a prototype (fast iterations on ideas and features). - Lots of frustrati…

Beyond a certain size and complexity (which is not that much), I find that the argument of typescript (and other typed languages) being less productive than untyped dynamic ones, is not true when you look at it as a whole. It might feel slower, especially to begin with, but once you get used to the language and semantics you save a vast amount of time, by the bugs you _don't_ debug and by not having to jump through the code all the time to find out what that function or module was called or what parameters it accepted. This of course is less true if you're using a lot of untyped packages, but as you said, most do have types either natively or in the DefinitelyTyped project. For most modules it's also feasible to declare the module typings manually, even doing it gradually for the parts that you happen to need at a given time.

Re: Using TypeScript with React

#7

Post by millstone »

manishsharan wrote: post #5

If you are going to learn a new programming language for web UI, why not go for Elm ? You get so much more than just static types with Elm.

JavaScript interop I suppose. TypeScript allows incremental integration with other JS libraries, while Elm forces an awkward ports/messaging abstraction.

Re: Using TypeScript with React

#8

Post by iraldir »

manishsharan wrote: post #5

If you are going to learn a new programming language for web UI, why not go for Elm ? You get so much more than just static types with Elm.

Looked at Elm and it looks quite interesting. however concerns for going to it

- Skill transfer. If I learn react, I can use my JavaScript skill to understand how everything works under the hood. If I learn Typescript with React, knowing react, I can focus on learning new language feature while not learning at the same time how to build the application. With Elm, I have to learn the language and the framework, all at once, basically learning from scratch.

- compatibilities with libraries. Here I definitely might be wrong, not knowing Elm enough, but okay, say you don't need a framework because it's included. What about utility library. Like i don't know, analytics or fancy animations?

- Job Market. I'm not going to learn a language that I cannot use anywhere, and if I'm a company, I'm not going to choose a language for which is going to be hard to hire people.

Now Elm sounds real cool and I want to like it. But it doesn't seem very wise to spend time doing that vs learning something like Apollo+Graphql, or Typescript, or Vue, which have much more obvious benefits to my career.

Re: Using TypeScript with React

#9

Post by ghego1 »

hki99 wrote: post #3

During my internship we've built a large prototype using React+Typescript, and here are some of my key take aways from it: - Quite often when using unreleased APIs, you turn to using "any" all over the place. - Development time is slower than writing in regular JS/React. This started to become a major issue due to the nature of our project being a prototype (fast iterations on ideas and features). - Lots of frustrati…

IMHO TypeScript saves a lot of time as soon as any project grows over few thousands lines of code. I'm working on a large project in which both backend and frontend are in JavaScript (node+PWA) and without TS it would have been close to impossible to proceed at the speed we did. Thanks to TS we easily know what types must be passed between client and server, and we can easily refactor or edit code without worrying that some mis-type somewhere will brake things. We don't use any anywhere (literally), it's not trivial, but as soon as you get to know TS well enough it's absolutely feasible, at least since TS 3.x.
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