(Noob here) Why can't we have built-in template integrations with Next, CRA, ESbuilds and Expo?

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I see how checking your compiled .js/.bs.js files are important, but why can’t we have built-in template integrations with Next, CRA, ESbuilds, and Expo like Typescript does so that we can write .res files and not have additional .bs.js files?

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What problem are you trying to solve?

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I don’t believe there is anything built into TypeScript regarding those specific libraries - rather it is the other way around, those libraries have built-in support for TypeScript. You could ask the library authors to support ReScript “natively”, but currently seems unlikely to happen given ReScript is still a niche language.

However, you should know that this probably could be solved using plugins or similar to those libraries. For instance, vite-plugin-rescript enables working with .res files directly. The .bs.js files are still generated in the lib folder, but they are only needed during bundling and can be ignored by git.

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Because TypeScript is running on JS, and therefore easier to integrate in JS based toolchains because they get access to TS’ compiler APIs. ReScript has a native toolchain and a restrictive compilation model, so it’s way harder to properly integrate it in any pre-existing JS tooling. Some ppl tried to create plugins that run sub-processes alongside the rest of the tools, but this caused all kinds of race-conditions and weird process states.

I personally like the fact that ReScript has its own process, compiles its own JS files that can be integrated the way I need it. Also, that way we have full control over the performance attributes of the ReScript compiler without other tools interfering with slow subprocesses.

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.bs.js files are great.
Most of configs (next, next-i18n) - are using js.
And you can not import anything from ts files, you need to compile it to js first.

With rescript I can store metadata, and than it will be compiled into .bs.js - so it can be imported an any config file that is not json.

For example, I had defined list of languages, and in a config imported it, so now for every language we have we generate sitemap. And since I import the list of languages, there is a single source of truth. No code duplication.

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