Facebook continues tools deluge with JavaScript type checker

From InfoWorld: With Tuesday's release of Flow, an open source static type checker, Facebook engineers are continuing their recent efforts to seed the community at large with tools built in-house.

"Flow adds static typing to JavaScript to improve developer productivity and code quality," Facebook technologists said in a blog post. "In particular, static typing offers benefits like early error-checking -- which helps you avoid certain kinds of runtime failures -- and code intelligence, which aids code maintenance, navigation, transformation, and optimization."

Flow is intended to enable developers to have the "feel" of coding JavaScript and does not force developers to change how they code, the post said:

Facebook loves JavaScript; it's fast, it's expressive, and it runs everywhere, which makes it a great language for building products. At the same time, the lack of static typing often slows developers down. Bugs are hard to find (e.g., crashes are often far away from the root cause), and code maintenance is a nightmare (e.g., refactoring is risky without complete knowledge of dependencies). Flow improves speed and efficiency so developers can be more productive while using JavaScript.

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