Flow v0.19.0 was deployed today! It has a ton of changes, which the Changelog summarizes. The Changelog can be a little concise, though, so here are some longer explanations for some of the changes. Hope this helps!
@noflow
Flow is opt-in by default (you add @flow
to a file). However we noticed that sometimes people would add Flow annotations to files that were missing @flow
. Often, these people didn't notice that the file was being ignored by Flow. So we decided to stop allowing Flow syntax in non-Flow files. This is easily fixed by adding either @flow
or @noflow
to your file. The former will make the file a Flow file. The latter will tell Flow to completely ignore the file.
Files that end with .flow
are now treated specially. They are the preferred provider of modules. That is if both foo.js
and foo.js.flow
exist, then when you write import Foo from './foo'
, Flow will use the type exported from foo.js.flow
rather than foo.js
.
We imagine two main ways people will use .flow
files.
coolLibrary.js
that is really hard to type with inline Flow types. You could put coolLibrary.js.flow
next to it and declare the types that coolLibrary.js
exports.// coolLibrary.js.flow
export var coolVar: number;
declare export function coolFunction(): void;
declare export class coolClass {} declare
awesomeLibrary.js
, but people who use awesomeLibrary.js
also use Flow. Well you could do something likecp awesomeLibraryOriginalCode.js awesomeLibrary.js.flow
babel awesomeLibraryOriginalCode --out-file awesomeLibrary.js
Now your local lib files will override the builtin lib files. Is one of the builtin flow libs wrong? Send a pull request! But then while you're waiting for the next release, you can use your own definition! The order of precedence is as follows:
[libs]
(in listing order)For example, if I want to override the builtin definition of Array and instead use my own version, I could update my .flowconfig
to contain
// .flowconfig
[libs]
myArray.js
// myArray.js
class Array<T> {
declare // Put whatever you like in here!
}
Previously the following code was an error, because the initialization of myString
happens later. Now Flow is fine with it.
function foo(someFlag: boolean): string {
var myString:string;
if (someFlag) {
= "yup";
myString else {
} = "nope";
myString
}return myString;
}