Ever wanted a language like JavaScript, but without the warts, with a great type system, and with a lean build toolchain that doesnāt waste your time?
Patrick Ecker from the ReScript Association sits down with Jerod and Feross to tell us all about this āJavaScript-like language you have been waiting forā.
Matched from the episode's transcript š
Patrick Ecker: [48:07] Yeah, yeah, sure. And companies like TinyMCE - they are building a rich-text editor platform with ReScript, and for that itās also fantastic. These really complex domains - this is where ReScript shines.
On the team, weāve got, as I said, Hongbo Zhang, who is now also working for Facebook, Cristiano Calcagno, who is one of the cleverest scientists I know. He has been working on the Infer project, if you know that, for code analysis and static analysis of all kinds of languages. He has huge knowledge about analyzing code, which is great for us, because we have a lot of dead code elimination analysis going on right now for ReScript, because itās fully typed. Super-nice to analyze.
Weāve got Cheng Lou, who has a huge vision on products, and designs, and lean, clean interfaces. I love that as well. Maxim Valcke, who is our master brain on the syntax level. He has been investing so much time into writing a syntax parser that is efficient and small. Itās super-fantastic work. And myself, of course, for working on the documentation; Iāve been doing this within the ReScript Association, as you already mentioned. The ReScript Association was founded with the goal to support the community and support a language with financial infrastructure, so people can send donations to it who are relying on the technology. So if you are a company who wants the language to succeed, the best way to invest money is to invest it in the association. Theyāre reallocating the money for developing the documentation, growing the editor tooling, working on core essential libraries, finding other projects, organizing conferences⦠We had like two conferences already - ReasonConf 2018 and 2019, and also a Reason conference in the U.S, which will most likely of course be rebranded to ReScriptConf.
So in the past 2,5 years we also collaborated with research institutes and companies, we collaborated with Ahrefs, which I already mentioned, with the Tezos cryptocurrency - theyāre also really invested in this, because they want their crypto wallet apps to be stable, and they chose ReScript for their web frontends, and stuff like that. Or subsidiaries of Tezos, of course. Tezos is a huge project.
So this is how we try to set a foundation for the language on the community side, on the open source side, but also we have a strong commitment on the business side with the core team, who is working at Facebook, and all other companies that depend on it.