Having high-quality and community-driven library definitions (“libdefs”) are important for having a great experience with Flow. Today, we are introducing flow-typed: A repository and CLI tool that represent the first parts of a new workflow for building, sharing, and distributing Flow libdefs.

The goal of this project is to grow an ecosystem of libdefs that allows Flow’s type inference to shine and that aligns with Flow’s mission: To extract precise and accurate types from real-world JavaScript. We’ve learned a lot from similar efforts like DefinitelyTyped for TypeScript and we want to bring some of the lessons we’ve learned to the Flow ecosystem.

Here are some of the objectives of this project:

The next release of Flow, 0.34, will include a few important changes to object types:

• property variance,
• invariant-by-default dictionary types,
• covariant-by-default method types,
• and more flexible getters and setters.

We are excited to announce that Flow is now officially available on 64-bit Windows! Starting with Flow v0.30.0, we will publish a Windows binary with each release. You can download the Windows binary in a .zip file directly from the GitHub releases page or install it using the flow-bin npm package. Try it out and report any issues you come across!

Getting Flow working on Windows was not easy, and it was made possible by the hard work of Grégoire, Çagdas and Fabrice from OCamlPro.

Summary#

Before Flow 0.28, the implementation of union/intersection types had serious bugs and was the root cause of a lot of weird behaviors you may have run into with Flow in the past. These bugs have now been addressed in a diff landing in 0.28.

Yesterday we deployed Flow v0.21.0! As always, we’ve listed out the most interesting changes in the Changelog. However, since I’m on a plane and can’t sleep, I thought it might be fun to dive into a couple of the changes! Hope this blog post turns out interesting and legible!

JSX Intrinsics#

If you’re writing JSX, it’s probably a mix of your own React Components and some intrinsics. For example, you might write

render() {
  return <div><FluffyBunny name="Fifi" /></div>;
}

In this example, FluffyBunny is a React Component you wrote and div is a JSX intrinsic. Lower-cased JSX elements are assumed to be intrinsics by React and by Flow. Up until Flow v0.21.0, Flow ignored intrinsics and gave them the type any. This meant Flow let you set any property on JSX intrinsics. Flow v0.21.0 will, by default, do the same thing as v0.20.0, However now you can also configure Flow to properly type your JSX intrinsics!