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TypeScript support added to Create React App

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Re: TypeScript support added to Create React App

#51

Post by sibeliuss »

netcraft wrote: post #42
qudat wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people are not onboard with the the idea then it might be an uphill battle. There is value in TS but it will be frustrating at times, you will get resistance from other developers, and every once in awhile it will not feel worth it. The other issue is that if people don't know what they are doing with TS, then imo it's worthless. I don't know your experience level with TS, but it is a non-trivial problem to build…

I wouldnt call myself an expert by any means, and sure there are lots of complicated types out there - but I feel we would get 90% of the benefits if all we did was 1) turn on the compiler in the first place 2) document the argument and return types of functions and 3) build some general interfaces of objects we are passing around. If we bailed out and typed anything more complicated as `any` it would still be a huge…

Yeah, there are so many crazy benefits just by naming your file `.ts` and writing vanilla JS. People can go as lightly or as deeply as they want once they understand how tsc works.

Re: TypeScript support added to Create React App

#52

Post by brylie »

netcraft wrote: post #41
swatcoder wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have influence over these kinds of decisions, then I expect have the experience to know that every choice has downsides. If you haven't found any yet, that should be a Big Red Flag to you. It means you've let yourself get blinded by hype. The good news is that you're part of a team, and your team will probably be able to point some out to you. Listen to them. Once you've finally gotten yourself a sense of both…

I responded to someone else saying this, but I guess it bears repeating. I'm not saying its a free lunch - it is a build step - there are things to learn - some of the more esoteric types can be very hard to understand. I exaggerated when I said there was no downsides, what I mean to say is that in the cost benefit analysis as I see it so far, the benefits massively outweigh the costs. I've written a fair bit of TS s…

For what it's worth, your grandparent comment didn't ask any questions, particularly about potential downsides of migrating to TypeScript. Perhaps there is a different comment where you asjed such questions?

In any case, happy coding

Re: TypeScript support added to Create React App

#53

Post by sibeliuss »

smt88 wrote: post #50
kumarharsh wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That feature is for JS files. It helps you convert your JS project into flow/TS in a piecewise manner. Otherwise you'll have to do a major rewrite in a very short amount of time.

> Otherwise you'll have to do a major rewrite in a very short amount of time. This just isn't true. TS was designed from the beginning to allow gradually adding types. Whether transpiling or using comments, you can change one file at a time.

Indeed -- interop works _very_ well.

Re: TypeScript support added to Create React App

#54

Post by sibeliuss »

jbchoo wrote: post #48
markatkinson wrote: post #47

This is awesome. I recently moved from Typescript to plain Javascript for a project and it is quite frustrating. You don't realise what you had till it's gone!

Yeah

What a scary thought... leaving TS and going back to JS.

Re: TypeScript support added to Create React App

#55

Post by a_humean »

naiyt wrote: post #26
chris_st wrote: post #23

I'd love to use TypeScript, but I've hit walls of errors that are nearly as bad as the old C++ template errors! (Though to be fair, this was a while ago, the compiler may have improved). SO: Any good way to learn TypeScript, particularly the more complicated types?

Have you used TypeScript 3.0? They improved the type errors a lot. I'd highly recommend giving it another shot.

That was one of the advertised major features for 3.0 and I really like TS, but I haven't noticed a difference.

Still getting frustratingly long and nested error messages that are impossible to read within a tooltip or error pane of vscode. More often than not I just missed or misspelled a single property off an object, but the best source of information for that ctrl+space to see what the non-optional properties are with autocomplete.

Maybe I'm spoilt from what I've seen in Rust and Elm, but either the error messages are useless or I need to copy and paste the tooltip contents into another editor window to spend 5 minutes to decipher them.

It could be that I'm just dealing with complex types with the various libraries I'm using, and so there isn't much TS can do. Some of the React types do seem to get complicated.

Re: TypeScript support added to Create React App

#56

Post by eksemplar »

netcraft wrote: post #6

offtopic, but I'm in the middle of trying to convince my small team to pick up typescript for a new significant node backend for our company. It seems like a no-brainer from my perspective. Compilation is fast, we would use `strict` but would allow devs to default to `any` if the types got too hard. There are no downsides but so many upsides - better refactoring, intellisense, documentation, communication of interfac…

Does it add value? I manage enterprise and we’ve tested typescript and found it added little value, but brought in complexity that slowed production.

Type safety isn’t worth having more complex prototypes, and having to keep up with both JS and Tyoescript, for us.

It’s very easy and forgiving to do a proof of concept though, because it integrates so easily into your existing code base.

Just be sure it actually adds real value and isn’t something you do for hype.

I’d certainly utilise it if we were building something as complex as VSC, but we aren’t, and I think it’s important to keep in mind that typescript isn’t all positive gains but that it also has downsides.

Re: TypeScript support added to Create React App

#57

Post by woutr_be »

netcraft wrote: post #6

offtopic, but I'm in the middle of trying to convince my small team to pick up typescript for a new significant node backend for our company. It seems like a no-brainer from my perspective. Compilation is fast, we would use `strict` but would allow devs to default to `any` if the types got too hard. There are no downsides but so many upsides - better refactoring, intellisense, documentation, communication of interfac…

I recently updated our small node backend to Typescript and it's absolutely great to work with. Even backend people who come from strict languages Scala / Kotlin / Java, are now able to use and understand this.

I've been doing the same thing on our Angular app, but it has become clear that most of the frontend developers here lack the understanding on type safety, they're just unable to comprehend it for some reason. I've seen PRs that were just completely wrong because they couldn't understand how to do things correctly now that it's all typed. These are purely frontend people tho, they hardly work with any other language than JavaScript. But I don't consider Typescript a massive change from JavaScript, it just adds typing to it. Which any programmer should be able to comprehend.

Personally for me it has been great, it forced me to refactor really bad code, because I noticed that multiple methods kept returning different things, so the backend codebase is a lot cleaner now. Tests also have improved a lot because of all this.

Perhaps it might be worth trying to figure out how your team thinks about this, they might just be worried that they won't be able to work on it.

Re: TypeScript support added to Create React App

#58

Post by baddox »

benatkin wrote: post #35
mikewhy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, cause just using typescript to compile means you get to drop a lot of Babel dependencies / eslint dependencies.

create-react-app is built on Webpack, for hot module replacement (HMR), and that requires a webpack loader. There's babel-loader and ts-loader. The stats in the projects are similar, but babel-loader is part of the babel project while ts-loader comes from an independent project, so it may be better integrated. Also ts-loader suggests using it with babel-loader. I'm not sure why, but if you install ts-loader and babel…

The last I checked (a month or so ago, but before the recent 2.0 release) create-react-app didn’t have hit module replacement. It just watched files and completely reloaded the browser when anything changed.

Re: TypeScript support added to Create React App

#59

Post by baddox »

scottmf wrote: post #29
karmakaze wrote: post #11

BTW, anyone here used ReastReason, BuckleScript is it? I've been meaning to look into it but don't have a sense of the payoff. I read that it can coexist which is a great feature. Wonder how it compares to a TypeScript workflow.

As much as I want to love it, I’ve found it far too restrictive, which makes it difficult to play around with and learn (although error messages have recently improved). And while I like that JSX is built-in, I don’t like that it’s so different. And having to use ReasonReact.stringToElement("Blah") (The spaces are required) everywhere instead of Blah makes it feel like a poor imitation of JSX and isn’t fun at all. Bu…

I find the benefits outweigh those disadvantages, but I would never suggest switching to Reason for a non-experimental project at work because I think the disadvantages scream “this isn’t quite ready yet.”

Re: TypeScript support added to Create React App

#60

Post by prmph »

a_humean wrote: post #55
naiyt wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you used TypeScript 3.0? They improved the type errors a lot. I'd highly recommend giving it another shot.

That was one of the advertised major features for 3.0 and I really like TS, but I haven't noticed a difference. Still getting frustratingly long and nested error messages that are impossible to read within a tooltip or error pane of vscode. More often than not I just missed or misspelled a single property off an object, but the best source of information for that ctrl+space to see what the non-optional properties are…

One trick I use: start from the bottom of the wall of error messages. Often the root cause of the problem will indicated there.
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