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Hmm, let me try to defend TypeScript, then. I think it’s a terrific language, and more importantly manages to salvage JavaScript into a very decent language. Coming from a mostly C/C++ background, I had been very skeptical of “gradually typed” languages like Dart (and now Python), but I’ve come around to the view that for many purposes it’s better than a completely statically typed compiled language. You don’t need to compile TS at all, just bundle it, which is lightning fast in current tools, so it feels almost as nimble as pure JS. But you have almost-instant type checking in tooltips and code completions, and you can run a full project check whenever you want (that’s slow, but still way faster than compiling Rust). The type system isn’t perfect but it’s incredibly expressive. Almost anything you could imagine doing in straightforward JS can be typed (admittedly sometimes with a lot of effort and head-scratching) and once typed it’s generally easy to use with confidence that most runtime errors will be avoided. The fact that JS and TS are separate languages is a bonus -- it keeps TS honest, and the competition between JS engines means runtime performance is great. If you were designing TS from scratch, I think you’d be tempted to add some kind of runtime type reification, but TS is better off without that. Completely erasing types means compilation will always be fast, and in my experience RTTI causes more architectural problems than it solves. |
Counterpoint: It's a desperate attempt to make Javascript useable and nearly does so, but ends up being weird in itself to get around the limitations of the underlying language.
I use Typescript most days and I hate it. Part of that is that npm is a dumpster fire but a lot of it is that Typescript is a rubbish version of much better languages and it hurts to use it. I am so desperate to get back to something sane like C# that I will quit this job for less money.