As of the time of 2016, most of the people agrees that Javascript is truly a language could be run anywhere. The pending problem to be solved is how to manage large Javascript projects. A few of industrial strength projects like Angularjs made the leap and turned to what Microsoft has proposed: Typescript. It’s quite obvious that it would be type-safe and easier to refactor by introducing a type system. Also, it is an optional typing system and therefore it works non-instrusively to your existing projects. You can gradually introduce Typescript’s type declaration file to get you the type-safe. Microsoft also has invested a lot on Typescript’s toolchain to make it work in Visual Studio Code and IDE. For the case that you need a production-ready and hiring-easy toolchain, Typescript is basically a no-brainer choice. Even so, I am still quite unsatisfied with all of the gotchas in Typescript inherited from Javascript in order to be 100% back-compatible. For the use cases that allows me to pick my language, I am still inclined to go for static-typed languages compiled to Javascript, with good Javascript interoperability.

There are a few options on the table that looks mature enough for use.

1. Ghcjs: Althouh officially it is still not 1.0, it seems to be good to use for some middle-size project. However, the downside is also obvious. It is the monstrous size Javascript with all of the Ghcjs runtime. a few lines of code could generate a few MB of target file. Maybe it is OK for the project where you rarely need to upgrade, then you don’t need to download the target Javascript very often. A famous use case is Plow Technology using Ghcjs for its dashboard, where I think it is a fair use case. The other downside is it is hard for Javascript world to call Haskell world, by the hindrance of the Generics and runtime. The good is that you can code in an extremely expressive static typed language with all of its ecosystem on Hackage.
2. Purescript: A Haskell-like language with is strict-by-default and almost everything in Haskell98 are included. It’s quite well-developed given that it is purely work from community without the support of companies. Completely new language and with strict semantic means it cannot leverage the ecosystem of Haskell and it has to do everything to be battery included. Since it’s release it has grown to the size that is usable and it’s interoperability with Javascript looks sound. Also the compiled Javascript is readable (though interleaved with the magic word of Monad in between). It worths considering if the project members all know Haskell.
3. Elm: The posterchild of Prezi and an experimentation on the feasibility of FRP. In the latest version it was overthrown and FRP interface was abandoned and turned to traditional Model-View-Controller. This is a big downer since it more-or-less showing you would be better not to rely on this project since it might introducing breaking changes and you are screwed. Apart from that it looks quite nice, The language is Haskell-like, but not only a language, it also comes with its infrastructure to make the composition of the program easier, Reactjs was inspired a lot from Elm, if you know Reactjs you can find a lot of common in their design.

Here comes today’s main character: Bucklescript. I read the 1.0 release news from Chinese quora: Zhihu. The creator of Bucklescript: Bob Zhang post a brief introduction of the language and target. I was intrigued by its compiled result. It looks super readable even more than Purescript, but at the same time support almost all of the OCaml ecosystem libararies to compiled to Javascript. It is derived from js_of_ocaml but heavily inspired by Typescript. It made me really would like to pick-up OCaml and play with it by a few toy example programs.

Due to a recent requirement I really need a Slack bot and I think it might be a good use case to test its interoperability with Javascript. What I use for Slack is Slack’s official nodejs library. Bascially you have to require the library and new an client object and using “on” method to listen on various events. And the events are defined as different attributes of the object.

Here is the toy program

    type rtmclient 
    external create_rtmclient: string -> rtmclient = “RtmClient” [@@bs.module “
    ”, “RtmClient”][@@bs.new] 
    let client = create_rtmclient “ABCDEFG”
    external start_client: rtmclient -> unit = “start” [@@bs.send]

    type rtmevent
    external message: rtmevent = “RtmClient.RTM_EVENTS.MESSAGE” [@@bs.val]
    external channel_created: rtmevent = “RtmClient.RTM_EVENTS.CHANNEL_CREATED” [@@bs.val]
    external on: rtmclient -> rtmevent -> (string -> unit [
    ]) -> unit = “” [@@bs.send]

    let handler: string -> unit [
    ] = fun [
    ] s -> Js.log(s)
    let () = on client channel_created handler 
    let () = on client message handler 
    let () = start_client client

And its compiled javascript

    // Generated by BUCKLESCRIPT VERSION 1.0.1 , PLEASE EDIT WITH CARE
    ‘use strict’;

    var RtmClient = require(“
    ”);

    var client = new RtmClient.RtmClient(“ABCDEFG”);

    function handler(s) {
     console.log(s);
     return /* () */0;
    }

    client.on(RtmClient.RTM_EVENTS.CHANNEL_CREATED, handler);

    client.on(RtmClient.RTM_EVENTS.MESSAGE, handler);

    client.start();

    exports.client = client;
    exports.handler = handler;
    /* client Not a pure module */

To be honest it looks nice for the compiled result, even you claimed that it is hand-written I think most of the people would believe you. Just that the document is still young and it cost me some time to figure out how to map the Javascript attribute into the OCaml world. Also, learning the magic of “@bs” attribute, especially the higher order use case took me some time to figure it out. As long as you mark the function with “@bs” then it is no longer the same type as the normal function, therefore you can not simply pass a lambda function to the Javascript world callback, you must mark it with “@bs”. And I still cannot get the hang of bringing values defined in Javascript world into OCaml’s polymorphic variants, I tried “@bs.as” but it didn’t work at all. Not sure if I missed something in the syntax.

Overall, I liked the language, not sure if it is officially supported by Bloomberg or just Bob’s side project derived from work. It also gave me a chance to improve my OCaml skill, which is a pending item in my Todo list. Now it is time to cross it off.

新しい言語を学んでいる人は色んな質問が持っていたに違いない。問題が早い答えれば早い答えほど多い進歩を遂げてきた。しかし、大部分の学習者は塾に行くて先生に質問をした。あの言語を喋るの友たちあれば、友たちから教えてくれた。何にでも、長所と短所の両方があります。先ずは、誰か外人の友たちがあるわけじゃないです。たとえ外人の友たちあるても、それぞれな質問を毎日すれば無理です。塾で先生を質問するついに、最も面倒は求めに応じる時間は長いです。言語交換も同じです。

HiNativeは、面白い作品がLang8を作られて、有名なPenPalのウェブサイト同じの会社です。このアプリ使うれば、質問がコミュニテイにするとできます。質問を入力で書くの形ならいろんです。写真など声などテキストなど、質問によるです。外語を含む看板を見たら、写真は一番良いの形です。喋ることの程度を評価したら、声の形が良いです。私最も好きな特色は、本格的な人々が質問を答えだから、生活の会話について、誰にもHiNativeより良いです。本国人はネイティブの分を教えてくれた。応じる時間も短くです、私の体験は平均的時間は一時間ぐらい答えを受けました。