Easing what has traditionally been a difficult programming task, Facebook has released as open source a debugging tool for JavaScript, called Flow, designed to highlight problems caused by the misuse of data types.

“Flow improves speed and efficiency so developers can be more productive while using JavaScript,” Facebook engineers said in a blog item posted Tuesday. Facebook has used Flow for many of its own projects.

Flow is a static type checker, one that ensures that when a program is run that its variables, functions and other elements of code will adhere to their original specifications. It can check to see if a value assigned to a variable is the correct type, for instance, a number rather than a string of characters. It can also check to see if a function is passed the correct number of inputs.

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