Facebook’s Flow could help programmers find elusive bugs in JavaScript

Facebook has announced that it’ll be releasing an early version of its open-source static type checker, known as Flow, for JavaScript. Flow is designed to help improve the productivity of developers and ensure code quality with features such as early error checking and code intelligence, according to the social media giant.

“Facebook loves JavaScript; it’s fast, it’s expressive, and it runs everywhere, which makes it a great language for building products. At the same time, the lack of static typing often slows developers down,” said the company on its official blog. “We have designed Flow so developers can reap its benefits without losing the ‘feel’ of coding in JavaScript.”

Flow allows developers to catch common flaws that’re found in JavaScript programs without the need to make any changes to their code, and can also identify invariants in their code in order to have the automatically maintained, according to All Facebook. This feature is opt-in, meaning that it won’t type check a developer’s code unless commanded to do so.

“This means that you can gradually convert your JavaScript codebase to Flow while reaping incremental benefits,” Facebook continued in its blog post. “When you do opt in a file, Flow tries to type check the code automatically by performing type inference, reporting errors without further manual guidance.”