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by osdiab 2380 days ago
My company uses Node with Typescript on the front and backend; we’ve strongly typed our APIs and thanks to the excellent io-ts library we’ve also automated the marshaling and unmarshaling data as it crosses the network boundary so that we can continue to use the strongly typed data, and also are constrained by the types to only call our APIs in valid ways.

Some subset of that can be achieved with stuff like GraphQL or Swagger and what not though I haven’t given it a serious try since we’ve never run into hiccups yet with this system, reliant on a very simple library.

We also use the same package manager (NPM) on both ends and can therefore invoke scripts all over our codebase with the same syntax; and although react code and node code is quite different in structure, they all have the same idioms and async syntax and stuff, so the amount of retraining necessary to convert someone from backend to full stack isn’t very large due to the same environment, and keeping code style consistent across the project is also easy.

So I feel like there’s definitely stuff to profit off of with sharing a single language.