My impressions of ReScript

I maintain a GitHub Action called check-for-changed-files. For the purpose of this blog post what the action does isn't important, but the fact that I authored it originally in TypeScript is. See, one day I tried to update the NPM dependencies. Unfortunately, that update broke everything in a really bad way due to how the libraries I used to access PR details changed and howthe TypeScript types changed. I had also gotten tired of updating the NPM dependencies for security concerns I didn't have since this code was only run in CI by others for their own use (i.e. regex denial-of-service isn't a big concern). As such I was getting close to burning out on the project as it was a nothing but a chore to keep it up-to-date and I wasn't motivated to keep the code up-to-date since TypeScript felt more like a cost than a benefit for such a small code base where I'm the sole maintainer (there's only been one other contributor to the project since the initial commit 4.5 years ago). I converted the code base to JavaScript in hopes of simplifying my life and it went better than I expected, but it still wasn't enough to keep me interested in the project.

And so I did what I needed to in order to be engaged with the project again: I rewrote it in another programming language that could run easily under Node. 😁 I decided I wanted to do the rewrite piecemeal to make sure I could tell if I was going to like the eventual outcome quickly rather than a complete rewrite from scratch and being unhappy with where I ended up (doing this while on parental leave made me prioritize my spare team immensely, so failing fast was tantamount). During my parental leave I learned Gleam because I loved their statement on expectations for community conduct on their homepage, but while it does compile to JavaScript I realized it works better when JavaScript is used as an escape hatch instead using Gleam to port an existing code base and so it wasn't a good fit for this use case.

My next language to attempt the rewrite with was ReScript thanks to my friend Dusty liking it. One of the first things I liked about the language was it had a clear migration path from JavaScript to ReScript in 5 easy steps. And since step 1 was "wrap your JavaScript code in %%raw blocks and change nothing" and step 5 was the optional "clean up" step, there was really only 3 main steps (I did have a hiccup with step 1, though, due to a bug not escaping backticks for template literals appropriately, but it was a mostly mechanical change to undo the template literals and switch to string concatenation).

A key thing that drew me to the language is its OCaml history. ReScript can have very strict typing, but ReScript's OCaml background also means there's type inference, so the typing doesn't feel that heavy. ReScript also has a functional programming leaning which I appreciate.

But having said all of that, ReScript does realize folks will be migrating or working with a preexisting JavaScript code base or libraries, and so it tries to be pragmatic for that situation. For instance, while the language has roots in OCaml, the syntax would feel comfortable to JavaScript developers. While supporting a functional style of programming, the language still has things like if/else and for loops. While the language is strongly typed, ReScript as things like its object type where the types of the fields can be inferred based on usage to make it easier to bring over JavaScript objects.

As part of the rewrite I decided to lean in on testing to help make sure things worked as I expected them to. But I ran into an issue where the first 3 testing frameworks I looked into didn't work with ReScript 11 (which came out in January 2024 and is the latest major version as I write this). Luckily the 4th one, rescript-zora, worked without issue (it also happens to be by my friend, Dusty, so I was able to ask questions of the author directly 😁; I initially avoided it so I wouldn't pester him about stuff, but I made up for it by contributing back). Since ReScript's community isn't massive it isn't unexpected to have some delays in projects keeping up with stuff. Luckily the ReScript forum is active so you can get your questions answered quickly if you get stuck. But this hiccup and the one involving %%raw and template literals, the process was overall rather smooth.

In the end I would say the experience was a good one. I liked the language and transitioning from JavaScript to ReScript went relatively smoothly. As such, I have ported check-for-changed-files over to ReScript permanently in the 1.2.1 release, and hopefully no one noticed the switch. 🤞