Followup: modularity, WebExtensions, and going faster

[David Teller]

On 12/10/16 13:33, David Bruant wrote:
> Microsoft faced the challenge of writing large JavaScript applications.
> They ended up inventing TypeScript for this very purpose. Facebook
> followed a couple of years later with Flow. Both have differences, but
> in practice the differences are barely noticeable as far as I'm concerned.
> Note that the Firefox devtools team is already using Flow
> https://github.com/devtools-html/debugger.html
> 
> Because of JavaScript limitations and "culture", the type system of
> either with never be as expressive as the Rust type system can be.
> However, I've never heard of it as an strong argument to move away from
> TypeScript or Flow.

Fwiw, we are currently trying to come up with a strategy to use either
Flow, TypeScript or Google Closure Compiler (which also performs
type-checking on JS) on our codebase.

Of course, the tools only makes sense if we have clean, well-designed
APIs, so the discussion on WebExtensions (or alternatives) is still on.

So far, from this discussion, I have parsed the following proposals:
- [customized] WebExtensions (which intends to answer the question "how
do we present the APIs?");
- Rust (which intends to answer the questions "how do we implement the
APIs"/"how do we encourage APIs to be well-typed");
- don't change anything (which, in my books, doesn't answer any question);
- "we don't understand the question yet".

Am I missing proposals?

Cheers,
 David