[Lyrkan]

> Except it doesn't provide Promises, Map, Sets (and I can't remember if they added Object.Assign support, but it also was not supported when I was using it). When you provide your own polyfills, TSC complains unless you provide typings and add specific config values informing it what you polyfilled.

I think you may have misunderstood what Typescript is and isn't.

It isn't meant to provide polyfills, it is only supposed to handle the grammar of the language that needs to be transpiled.

That's why you have the two following settings: - target : Which version of the grammar will be available at runtime (eg. classes, async, ...), that's the part used by the transpiler - lib : Which libraries (eg. promises, maps, sets, ...) you know will be available at runtime (only used for type-checking)

Using a polyfill is really easy if you are using the right value for "lib" since the it will have the same signature as the real method: simply import it once in your project.

[theprotocol]

That's fair enough. My actual main issue with this is that TS was hostile towards any external JS libraries, especially before 1.8, but still sporadically in 1.8+, and that affected polyfills too. I also had serious issues importing external libraries that provided their own polyfills.

It was sort of a catch-22 that it didn't like JS yet expected JS polyfills. This has been greatly improved but it took far too long for a project that purports to be a part of the JS ecosystem, which raises questions and I must admit, makes me cynical about whether this was a business tactic.

I've now written many replies with elaborations and clarifications of my criticisms, so it may seem like I'm excessively negative about TS. I actually really like the language itself, especially the static type checking, which is the one main selling point. The OO language features are great because they're optional. I just think everything around the language is rough, and if you're unlucky with it, it can ruin the whole experience.

I remember that at one point, people would declare `require` and use `import whatever = require('whatever')` for npm libraries. This thing was for the longest time absolutely hostile towards JS, and some remnants of that philosophy remain to this day.

I have not forgotten being told to write what amounts to C header files, for JavaScript, in order to allow TSC to play nice with the ecosystem! That was definitely hubris.