jordwalke

It is.

- It's Just JavaScript With Types

- It's Usable

- It Has Full Type Safety

Pick two.

I think the TypeScript is aware of the tradeoffs, have chosen the first two, and the result is a great developer/IDE experience for JavaScript programs (props!). Reason chooses the last two and creates a great experience for writing very safe web apps.

You forgot the most important part: "to the largest audience possible". I think that's the biggest disconnect here.

I believe it does address part of your comments. At the very least:

"And then we have the ReasonML project that has seen even less activity recently"

You comment seemed to be based on the assumption that the Reason syntax is the sum total of the Reason project, and I provided examples that would adjust that frame of reference. See the high level goal I mentioned - bring fast development, fast running, fully type safe programming to the largest audience possible. Syntax is one important piece, but not everything, and it's not everything under the ReasonML project umbrella.

Under that definition of "native", it's pretty clear developers don't care very much about having "native" text editors/IDEs, wouldn't you agree? You can look at editor usage to see how they are voting.

The other thing to consider is that developers spend up to ten hours a day in these editors. The biggest benefits of OS-coherent UI is that an application is quickly learnable for the first week. But when you use an editor for multiple years, all day long, many would trade that for increased customizability.

I'll adopt whatever definition you want "native" to mean for the discussion - and under your definition of native, I would say it's pretty clear that users of text editors and developer tools don't care much at all about "native"(your definition of using the platform provided widgets). Just look at the market share of developer tools and IDEs/editors that don't use stock platform widgets. They are the ones that have become dominant. The problems that people have with the dominant players that have gained traction is the performance. You might be able to make the case that using stock widgets matters for non-developer tools (and I would only partially agree there), but for developer tools when people say they want "native" they are more likely to mean they want the performance that more often comes with natively compiled languages without a VM. It makes sense that developers would trade stock platform-widgets in exchange for an editor with greater cross platform reach because users of these tools benefit from network effects of these tools having wider reach. They want someone to have written the plugin/extension they're looking for.

Personally, I'm not looking to increase the ways that I'm locked into my current operating system, so all else equal, I'd favor an editor that runs everywhere.

ReasonML does not imply JavaScript - it can compile natively using the OCaml native compilers - and that's exactly what Revery does. GLFW is also native/C.

It appears that (at least) Safari cannot open mhtml files. The benefit of a tool such as what the OP shared is that it can produce plain html pages that are openable by anyone. (also, I tried mhtml in Chrome using the proper flag and it doesn't appear to store/inline/render static assets correctly).