Ask HN: Does type safety matter for a web app?

I don't think web vs non-web makes a difference for whether or not you should choose a type-safe language. IMO, you should err toward type safety whenever possible. It's way nicer for your toolchain to catch errors before a user does.

Even PHP is moving in that direction. If the PHP community can embrace type safety, I'm certain that you can :)

Type safety matters insofar as it (arguably) makes development a lot easier.

So I guess that indirectly has an effect on the webapp, but your users will not care what tech stack you use.

Way I think of it is more of a design-decision.

If I am comfortable with a more powerful typed language, it can do so much of the heavy-lifting for me, i.e: I used PureScript for a toy project and using type-directed search and type-safe routing and json deserialization was awesome.

I would put Elm and ReasonML/Ocaml into simmilar bucket (maybe even haskell with ghcjs and its reflex-frp library :)

On the other hand I would rather write pure javascript than try to compile golang to wasm (even though I know of people that are happy with that :)

I have no strong opinion on typescript.

Disclaimer: I have never had to maintain any web-page I wrote, all of them were toy project and I writhe python and go backend-services at work :D

You want to use TypeScript? Does it run natively in the browser?