wtf is flow-remove-types?

Flow is a tool that lets JavaScript developers add type annotations to their code, basically, explicit notes about what kind of data a function should receive or what a variable should contain. These annotations help catch bugs early and make code clearer to read. However, those annotations aren't valid JavaScript, so they need to be stripped out before the code actually runs. This tool does exactly that: it takes JavaScript files with Flow type annotations and removes them, leaving behind clean, standard JavaScript that Node.js or browsers can execute. It's designed as a lightweight alternative to Babel, a popular but heavier tool that does type stripping as just one of many features. If you're only interested in removing Flow types and not doing other code transformations, this tool gets you there much faster with fewer dependencies to download. You can use it from the command line to convert individual files or entire directories, or you can call it as a JavaScript function within your own build scripts. The README also mentions that it works as a Node.js REPL replacement and as a require hook, so you can even run Flow-annotated code directly without a separate build step. The magic of how it works is that when it removes types, it replaces them with whitespace rather than actually deleting them, that way, line numbers and character positions stay the same, which makes the output easier to debug and means it plays nicely with existing build tools. The project's main selling point is speed and simplicity. The README includes performance benchmarks showing that installing it is about seven times faster than installing Babel plus its Flow plugin, and transforming files is more than twice as fast. If you're building a Node.js project that uses Flow and you don't need Babel for other reasons, this is a much leaner choice.