[karmakaze]

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.

[scottmf]

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 <div> ReasonReact.stringToElement("Blah") </div> (The spaces are required) everywhere instead of <div>Blah<div> makes it feel like a poor imitation of JSX and isn’t fun at all. But maybe they’ve fixed some of that.

Someone else said Reason is “better”. The type system might be more sound but TS is far more flexible and forgiving, and doesn’t have ugly and off-putting syntax for promises/async and interop.

[baddox]

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.”

[jey]

Yeah, I'm looking forward to syntactic sugar for JSX strings and async/await.

[scns]

Error messages could be better, Elm has set the bar in that regard.

Types are inferred, i only had to write a type once to disambiguate. Fearless Refactoring. If it compiles it works, except if you built in some logic errors. The compiler will find all syntactic and type errors, which might feel annoying at first but if you reframe it into the compiler is helping you then it is fine.

[bgorman]

Much faster compilation times, very strick static type checking, however a very small community. Interop syntax is pretty tedious but it has no performance penalty. For example Clojurescript has a much bigger community.

[Rotareti]

If you find yourself using ImmutableJS, Ramda, Recompose, etc. in your React project, you should have a look at ReasonReact. It felt like a breath of fresh air to me.

[jey]

I'm diving into Reason now and it seems great. It seems like "Flow done right" -- about a year ago, I did a study of both Flow and TypeScript, then picked Flow because it seemed more principled and expressive. But it turned out that bolting Flow onto Javascript left it with a lot of edge cases and some oddities, but Reason instead avoids that by compiling to javascript instead of being bolted atop Javascript.

tldr: Reason is better than both TypeScript and Flow and has equally good interop with native untyped Javascript code.