{"id":20722,"date":"2017-05-18T10:58:21","date_gmt":"2017-05-18T14:58:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/company\/stories\/release-1-7-story-behind-bucklescript\/"},"modified":"2022-03-04T23:12:33","modified_gmt":"2022-03-05T04:12:33","slug":"release-1-7-story-behind-bucklescript","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/company\/stories\/release-1-7-story-behind-bucklescript\/","title":{"rendered":"Release 1.7 and the story behind BuckleScript"},"content":{"rendered":"
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At the Compose Conference 2017<\/a> in New York City later this week, BuckleScript<\/a> author Hongbo Zhang, a senior programmer here at Bloomberg, will deliver his first formal conference presentation about BuckleScript and how this optimizing compiler makes functional programming more accessible to JavaScript developers. Ahead of his talk at the conference, we wanted to let him share details about the latest update to the platform.<\/em><\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n

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It has been a while since we announced<\/a> the release of BuckleScript 1.0, and the quality of the BuckleScript compiler and its build system have improved significantly since then.<\/p>\n

As an engineer, I would prefer solving challenging technical problems to writing articles. However, this release includes several large improvements and I believe BuckleScript has reached the point where it may be the<\/em> state-of-art Alt-JS compiler. So I decided to spend some time writing about this release and sharing my story about BuckleScript and JavaScript.<\/p>\n

My experience with JavaScript<\/h2>\n

As a developer who knew very little about Web UI development, I was shocked by the power and reach of the JavaScript platform. Back in 2012, when I saw the entire OCaml<\/a> compiler could be hosted in a browser<\/a> and run very smoothly, it truly surprised me, especially given the complexity of the compiler. More than that, the hosted OCaml toplevel also provided the support of Camlp4<\/a>, which is another complex beast.<\/p>\n

At that point, I got hooked by the power of the JavaScript platform.<\/p>\n

The appearances of Node.js and Electron liberated JavaScript from the browser environment. Without a doubt, the JavaScript platform is currently one of the most heavily-invested programming languages.<\/p>\n

Languages running on JavaScript<\/h2>\n

I truly love JavaScript as a dynamic language; despite some warts, it is an enjoyable, dynamic language, especially modern JavaScript (ES6 or later).<\/p>\n

However, like most dynamic languages, refactoring is a miserable experience in a large code base, and it is not uncommon to have a JavaScript project contain thousands of lines of code. Even trivial refactoring could result in runtime failures. While such bugs may be easy to fix, they are still a waste of time, not to mention mentally disturbing.<\/p>\n

That’s probably why Microsoft, Google and Facebook and other tech companies all started to invest in building type systems on top of JavaScript:<\/p>\n