Union Types in Flow & Reason

Union types are powerful yet often overlooked. At work, I’d noticed that using union types in Flow incurred a creeping cost in terms of a bloated bundle size.

In this talk, I explore why that’s the case. We starts with a problem which union types can solve, flesh out the problem to motivate why union types are definitely the solution, then examine the resulting cost of introducing them. In the end, we compare Flow to other compile-to-JS languages on the basis of how they represent union types in the compiled output. I’m especially excited about Reason, so we talk about it the most.

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