Nylas-mail: PR: Initial support for flow

[amilajack]

Projects of this scale can benefit from static type checking. I think adding flow support to nylas would be a great addition in terms of scalability. Flow can be run as an eslint rule so integration isnt very hard. Here's a demo of a plugin that can run flow as an eslint plugin:

Thoughts? 😁

[emorikawa]

@amilajack Agreed! It's underway 😄

[amilajack]

@emorikawa Great! Have you guys already started the migration to flow? Is there a branch for that?

[bengotow]

There actually is! I'm not sure if it's public though? (cc @emorikawa). We're also looking to move our internal API documentation to http://documentation.js.org/ which is awesome because the flow type decorations get turned into @params in the docs.

[amilajack]

@bengotow @emorikawa would love to help out with the integration! Lmk where I can help 😀.

[bengotow]

Initial support for flow typechecking has landed on master, and we've been trying it out on a few files internally. At this point it doesn't look like we'll commit to updating the entire codebase to use Flow. The Flow docs (https://flowtype.org/docs/existing.html) mention:

Making previously-untyped code typecheck with Flow may take some time and work - and sometimes it may not be worth the effort in the short term.

It definitely seems like that's the case so far. We actually haven't found any bugs or issues with Flow yet!

[amilajack]

I've experienced this as well. I've found flow much more useful for workflow when writing new code as opposed to running it on already tested code.