Flow is excited to announce Component Syntax, adding first-class support for React primitives such as components and hooks to the Flow language. These features bring improved ergonomics, expressiveness, and static enforcement for many of the Rules of React.
Conditional types allow you to choose between two different output types by inspecting an input type.
Flow now lets you define a function that encodes a type predicate over its parameter.
To make it easier for new users to get started with Flow, we’re updating our type casting syntax to use 'as'.
We’ve refreshed our documentation, and added the ability to configure options and lints in Try Flow!
Labeled tuple elements, read-only tuples, optional tuple elements, tuple spread, and more.
As of v0.201.0, Flow can now lint against unused/floating Promises. Unused promises can be dangerous, because errors are potentially unhandled, and the code may not execute in the intended order. They are usually mistakes that Flow is perfectly positioned to warn you about.
Starting in Flow version 0.201, make an object type’s fields all optional using Partial<ObjType> (use instead of the unsafe $Shape),
and make an object type’s optional fields required with Required<ObjType>.
We announced 5 years ago a plan to eventually make exact object types the default. We are now proceeding with this plan.
Local Type Inference makes Flow’s inference behavior more reliable and predictable, by modestly increasing Flow’s annotation requirement, bringing it closer to industry standard and capitalizing on increasingly strongly and explicitly typed codebases.
Flow handled the empty object literal in a permissive but unsafe way. The fix described in this post increases safety and predictability, but requires using different patterns and behavior.
Flow will now require more annotations to functions and classes.
Flow is releasing a new language rule that determines the type of an unannotated variable at its initialization. Along with these new rules come several fixes to soundness bugs that were causing refinements to not be invalidated.
We're replacing Flow’s current inference engine with a system that behaves more predictably and can be reasoned about more locally.
Flow Enums are an opt-in feature which allow you to define a fixed set of constants which create their own type.
A comparison of the enums features of TypeScript and Flow.
Flow’s Indexed Access Types are a new type annotation syntax that allows you to get the type of a property from an object, array, or tuple type.
Improvements in soundness for this-typing in Flow, including the ability to annotate this on functions and methods.
An update on Flow's direction and open source engagement.
Types-First will become the only mode in Flow in v0.143 (mid Jan 2021).
Flow has improved its handling of generic types by banning unsafe behaviors previously allowed and clarifying error messages.
Flow Types-First mode is out! It unlocks Flow’s potential at scale by leveraging fully typed module boundaries. Read more in our latest blog post.
We’re improving Flow error suppressions so that they don’t accidentally hide errors.
Learn about how Flow will improve in 2020.
Take a look back at improvements we made to Flow in 2019.
Object types will become exact-by-default. Read this post to learn how to get your code ready!
Fixes to object spreads will expose errors in your codebase. Read more about common errors and how to fix them.
Live errors while you type makes Flow feel faster in your IDE!
Changes are coming to how Flow models object spreads! Learn more in this post.
Having trouble upgrading from 0.84.0? Read about how the Flow team upgrades Flow at Facebook!
Flow 0.92 improves on the Flow developer experience.
Take a look at what the Flow was up to in 2018.
We made some major changes to our React model to better model new React components. Let's talk about React.AbstractComponent!
Flow will be asking for more annotations starting in 0.85.0. Learn how to deal with these errors in our latest blog post.
We are changing object types to be exact by default. We'll be releasing codemods to help you upgrade.
TL;DR: Starting in 0.68.0, Flow will now error when you access unknown properties in conditionals.
Over the last year, the Flow team has been slowly auditing and improving all the possible error messages generated by the type checker. In Flow 0.66 we’re excited to announce a new error message format designed to decrease the time it takes you to read and fix each bug Flow finds.
One month ago Recompose landed an official Flow library definition. The definitions were a long time coming, considering the original PR was created by @GiulioCanti a year ago.
In the last few weeks, a proposal for private class fields in Javascript reached stage 3. This is going to be a great way to hide implementation details away from users of your classes. However, locking yourself in to an OOP style of programming is not always ideal if you prefer a more functional style. Let’s talk about how you can use Flow’s opaque type aliases to get private properties on any object type.
The first version of Flow support for React was a magical implementation of
React.createClass(). Since then, React has evolved significantly. It is time
to rethink how Flow models React.
Flow’s type information is useful for so much more than just proving your programs are correct. Introducing Flow linter.
Do you ever wish that you could hide your implementation details away from your users? Find out how opaque type aliases can get the job done!
One of Flow's original goals was to be able to understand idiomatic JavaScript. In JavaScript, you can call a function with more arguments than the function expects. Therefore, Flow never complained about calling a function with extraneous arguments.
We are changing this behavior.
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:
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.
Before Flow 0.28, the implementation of union/intersection types had serious bugs and was [the][gh1759] [root][gh1664] [cause][gh1663] [of][gh1462] [a][gh1455] [lot][gh1371] [of][gh1349] [weird][gh842] [behaviors][gh815] you may have run into with Flow in the past. These bugs have now been addressed in [a diff landing in 0.28][fotu].
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!
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!
Flow v0.19.0 was deployed today! It has a ton of changes, which the Changelog summarizes. The Changelog can be a little concise, though, so here are some longer explanations for some of the changes. Hope this helps!
@noflowFlow is opt-in by default (you add @flow to a file). However we noticed that
sometimes people would add Flow annotations to files that were missing @flow.
Often, these people didn't notice that the file was being ignored by Flow. So
we decided to stop allowing Flow syntax in non-Flow files. This is easily fixed
by adding either @flow or @noflow to your file. The former will make the
file a Flow file. The latter will tell Flow to completely ignore the file.
Files that end with .flow are now treated specially. They are the preferred
provider of modules. That is if both foo.js and foo.js.flow exist, then
when you write import Foo from './foo', Flow will use the type exported from
foo.js.flow rather than foo.js.
We imagine two main ways people will use .flow files.
Flow 0.14.0 included support for generator functions. Generator functions provide a unique ability to JavaScript programs: the ability to suspend and resume execution. This kind of control paves the way for async/await, an upcoming feature already supported by Flow.