At Hasura, we wanted to introduce a statically typed frontend language for quite some time now. We discussed which one we should choose and evaluated options such as PureScript, TypeScript, ReasonML, and Elm. Following aspects were most crucial to us:
- Hasura Console is a pretty large codebase for a small team, so we can’t rewrite it all to the new language. We need something that works well with the existing JavaScript code. A language that we can inject into our codebase and gradually migrate.
- We use React extensively. Thus we need something that goes with React well and improves React components development.
- We want to enhance developer experience for the external contributors and us. By adopting a statically typed programming language, we aim to make things easier, and the development process way faster. We don’t want to introduce high adoption cost nor force developers to learn a new and completely different language.
After all of the discussions, we decided to choose TypeScript. In this article, I’m going to tell you how we made the decision and why we wanted a statically typed language in the first place. I will also walk you through all of the four languages by a brief overview of each of them.
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