In the last few days, I’ve been working hard on learning ReasonReact by creating a small project.
I’ve learned a lot, but it has been quite frustrating, too.
At the moment, I’m trying to set up form validation logic. ReasonReact is giving me the stink eye.
I recently bought the book Learn Type-Driven Development by Yawar Amin. He is a helpful member of the community and seems to know his stuff.
(The book’s title surely doesn’t do a good job of communcating that it’s a book about ReasonML.)
I still have some misconceptions about several concepts in ReasonML (Ocaml) that are hurting me during development. I hope the book can mitigate that.
So far, I’ve enjoyed the challenge, but I’m not sure if ReasonReact is a better alternative for front-end development.
Frameworks like Svelte.js or writing React.js with TypeScript offer a better developer experience, a bigger community, and seamless JavaScript interop.
ReasonML has the advantage of being a functional language and piggybacking on Ocaml, which is a stable and well-researched language. It’s faster than TypeScript.
But a ReasonReact code base ships as much JavaScript as React, thus it is not leaner.
If Svelte.js would get TypeScript support, it could be the React.js killer.
I do not see ReasonReact there.