Flow vs TypeScript: Which Is Better Suited For Your Next Project?
As projects become more complex for JavaScript developers, new tools and practices arise to improve code quality and workflows. In addition to unit testing, static type checkers such as TypeScript and Flow are becoming the norm among professional development teams.
Regardless of project size, the benefits of making code more comprehensible while also catching errors during the development phase have proved invaluable. As a result, the question being asked by many is: which tool should I use, Flow or TypeScript? For the context of this article, we’ll be focusing on and using examples with respect to React (given its current popularity), but the analysis will be relevant regardless of what framework you may be using.
As a professional web developer with over five years of experience, I’ve worked on large JavaScript codebases without the use of a type-checking tool. I’ve experienced the associated pitfalls and have seen situations where runtime errors that could have been caught in dev reached production more times than I can count. For the last three years, I’ve primarily used TypeScript, and I can tell you that as a result these kinds of errors were effectively eliminated. Through side projects, I’ve also gained exposure to Flow and have found it to be a great tool to add type safety to a new or existing JavaScript codebase. It’s become clear to me that the use of some form of static type checking is essential in the modern JavaScript ecosystem.
In this article, I’ll provide a brief introduction to these tools and illustrate the way they function. I’ll also explain how to integrate both TypeScript and Flow into a simple React application to show them in action. Then, I’ll weigh their benefits and compare them in terms of functionality, ease of use, community support, and more. Finally, I’ll review the key points to help you decide which of these two tools is best suited for your project.
Table Of Contents
What Is TypeScript?
TypeScript is a programming language developed by Microsoft. It is open-source and is supported by a large and active community.
As mentioned on its official website:
“TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript.”
Let’s focus on two words of the previous statement, “typed” and “superset.” The word “typed” indicates that TypeScript requires that the programmer declare the datatype of a given variable. The word “superset” indicates that TypeScript allows the programmer to use all the features that JavaScript provides, plus some additional TypeScript-specific features like interfaces, generics, decorators, etc.
