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JSMonk / hegel

An advanced static type checker
https://hegel.js.org
MIT License
2.1k stars 59 forks source link

Mention another benefit of Hegel in the documentation #365

Open flowstate247 opened 2 years ago

flowstate247 commented 2 years ago

There is an advantage that I discovered Hegel has compared to Java, TypeScript and Flow that should be mentioned in the documentation in my opinion.

I explained it in these TypeScript issues: https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/49549 https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/49582

Basically the way Hegel treats type propagation, in conjunction with the never type, makes it possible to get rid of the whole verbose throws Java-esque mechanism that would otherwise be required to be safe in the Java language, and that is missed entirely in TypeScript and Flow making those languages unsafe.

Yamboy1 commented 1 year ago

I've found in previous java projects that it's very easy to just wrap a checked exception with a try catch block that throws an unchecked exception, such as a RuntimeException, to get the error to go away. While I agree with this in principle, I feel like I'm practice, it gets more in the way than it is useful.

What I reckon would be more useful, is having jsdoc that annotates the different methods that are thrown. Maybe it could be possible to write tooling around checking the jsdoc and making sure that all errors brought up in jsdoc are handled, but I don't think modifying type syntax would be any more useful here than jsdoc.

Additionally jsdoc can provide more information about why an error exists, that couldn't be portrayed using types, and seriously, if you're not currently using jsdoc, you're missing out on very useful tooling, so an argument that it's extra tooling would be invalid imo