Open-sourcing the Sorbet VS Code Extension

Re:Open-sourcing the Sorbet VS Code Extension by yashap on Friday January 07, 2022 @10:12PM (#29848254)

I think the main issue with TypeScript’s type system is that most of the time, there’s no runtime types. You know something matches an interface, but if you have some untyped object (like say a thrown error from some lib that you caught), and you need to check if it’s a X, often it’s pretty awkward and hacky to do so. Obviously this issue is inherited from JS, but it’s still an issue.

Great type system and language otherwise, though.

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Re:Open-sourcing the Sorbet VS Code Extension by IshKebab on Saturday January 08, 2022 @08:08AM (#29851295)

That's not an issue if you code properly. Most statically typed languages only have run-time type information as a sort of "ok fine if you're desperate you can use it, but please don't" feature.

Exceptions are a special exception in Typescript because they can come from pretty much anywhere so it can't realistically know the type at compile time.

For everything else you are probably want discrimination unions.

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Re:Open-sourcing the Sorbet VS Code Extension by yashap on Saturday January 08, 2022 @04:13PM (#29856351)

Yeah, for your own code it’s not really an issue, as long as you’ve got decent team-wide discipline. But when integrating with external libraries, especially JS ones with type definitions tacked on later, it can be an annoyance.

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Re:Open-sourcing the Sorbet VS Code Extension by comp_throw7 on Sunday January 09, 2022 @02:13PM (#29866379)

Yeah, the story for handling thrown errors is much worse than it is in Java, and arguably worse than e.g. C#. But it's not a total loss:

1) 99.9%+ of the time, it'll be an instance of `Error` or some child class.

2) There's a recent compiler flag that's been added which defaults caught errors to `unknown` rather than `any`.

3) You still have access to the same tools to inspect unknown errors as you do everything else - `instanceof`, checking the presence/absence of properties, etc.

It's not great but it's something.

I would actually say the propensity of libraries to use exceptions as control flow and then _fail to document anything about those totally expected outcomes_ is a much bigger headache; that truly is an artifact of its JS inheritance.

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