How is moving everything to Typescript a "product" decision, that's like the worst technical decision possible (complete rewrite for very little benefit).
Re:Matrix at FOSDEM 2019
by sandGorgon on Monday February 04, 2019 @09:31PM
(#19082640)
I didn't downvote you, but let me explain.
The product improvement point was separate from this point and in all honesty is just my personal opinion.
I'm seeing a bunch of type safety bugs crop up periodically (e.g. https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/3191 and https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/4112). I think there is also Dendrite in golang which is a higher performance and typesafe server in golang. Personally i think since the reference client in react is unavoidable (and that's where the product innovation really happens), it is probably more efficient for the org to have everything in typescript and make life easy for engineers/contributors.
I have my startup founder hat on when I say this.
But I think the product will need to be radically better to go down this road. Not tech...but product. And yes I have evaluated the new experimental release very closely (we were about to purchase a 300 seat license for a Hipchat replacement).
Personally I think that the infrastructure can be simplified and corrected - I think that instead of a python based server with a react based reference client (riot), it would be simpler to have the reference server and client in Typescript. The packaging and development is simpler and you also get type safety (which would be very important for innovation at the cryptographic protocols level).