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TypeScript 7

devblogs.microsoft.com

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Re: TypeScript 7

#21

Post by ChadNauseam »

ajkjk wrote: post #17
adamddev1 wrote: post #14

Remember when people would argue about how types weren't worth the effort? I love TypeScript, if nothing else for how it's been able to popularize types.

I don't think ... serious people... argued that. That's a bit hyperbolic so I'm sure I'm wrong, but I have an ace: if you point me at very smart people who argued against types I'm gonna say that they weren't serious. I think it's not possible, if you have the relevant experience of working on both typed and untyped codebases of at least moderate complexity with at least one collaborator, to come away seriously belie…

It's easy to say that now, but it used to be that all mainstream typed languages had absolutely terrible type systems that got in your way as much as they helped

Re: TypeScript 7

#22

Post by hombre_fatal »

ajkjk wrote: post #17
adamddev1 wrote: post #14

Remember when people would argue about how types weren't worth the effort? I love TypeScript, if nothing else for how it's been able to popularize types.

I don't think ... serious people... argued that. That's a bit hyperbolic so I'm sure I'm wrong, but I have an ace: if you point me at very smart people who argued against types I'm gonna say that they weren't serious. I think it's not possible, if you have the relevant experience of working on both typed and untyped codebases of at least moderate complexity with at least one collaborator, to come away seriously belie…

> I don't think ... serious people... argued that.

Static vs dynamic typing is no less ubiquitous in online forums over the decades than tabs vs spaces and vim vs emacs.

Re: TypeScript 7

#25

Post by raddan »

chroma_zone wrote: post #18

I'm glad the JSDoc type syntax is still getting some focus. It's my favorite way to use typescript in my own projects. Some of the syntax changes will be annoying to update but most of them seem to be for the better.

I'm glad that TypeScript uses JSDoc and not the hideous XML format [1] that Microsoft's other languages use.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-ref...

Re: TypeScript 7

#27

Post by steve_adams_86 »

ajkjk wrote: post #17
adamddev1 wrote: post #14

Remember when people would argue about how types weren't worth the effort? I love TypeScript, if nothing else for how it's been able to popularize types.

I don't think ... serious people... argued that. That's a bit hyperbolic so I'm sure I'm wrong, but I have an ace: if you point me at very smart people who argued against types I'm gonna say that they weren't serious. I think it's not possible, if you have the relevant experience of working on both typed and untyped codebases of at least moderate complexity with at least one collaborator, to come away seriously belie…

I worked with people who would consider themselves serious, and are still in the industry and doing fine. A few have certainly gone on to be more prominent and get paid a lot more than I am—not that it's a perfect measure of seriousness.

In the early days they would often say things like "but we have prop types, why use TypeScript", "why not use JSDoc" (this made no sense at the time), or "it's an exercise in needless complexity". It was really tough to sell them on TypeScript for years.

I think there are developers who are very goal-oriented with a narrow perspective on getting from point A to point B, and their understanding of the process isn't particularly holistic, rigorous, or geared towards external or knock-on factors like maintainability, performance, bugs, etc. They deal with it when circumstances force them to, and no sooner. Defining types is a complete waste of time to someone like that.

These people thrive where teams are primarily expected to just ship things, and in my experience they often hate needing to think about things like types, tests, or code quality beyond running a linter.

So, they're serious people in one school of thought. They contribute meaningfully to projects. I think they're a large constituent of the new class of vibe coders who laugh at you if you look at the code. That's fine, they're doing their thing, and there are more than a few ways to get programs into people's hands. That way just isn't the way I like to.

Re: TypeScript 7

#28

Post by stymaar »

Performance improvements, yay !

It always surprises me how little complaints there have been on HN about tsc's performance. I do both TypeScript and Rust at work, and I've seen orders of magnitude more comments on the web about how “rustc is slow” than complaints about tsc's performance and it never stops to surprise me given than in practice the later have annoyed me consistently more than the former.

Re: TypeScript 7

#29

Post by steve_adams_86 »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #21
ajkjk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think ... serious people... argued that. That's a bit hyperbolic so I'm sure I'm wrong, but I have an ace: if you point me at very smart people who argued against types I'm gonna say that they weren't serious. I think it's not possible, if you have the relevant experience of working on both typed and untyped codebases of at least moderate complexity with at least one collaborator, to come away seriously belie…

It's easy to say that now, but it used to be that all mainstream typed languages had absolutely terrible type systems that got in your way as much as they helped

Absolutely, TypeScript is remarkably expressive in my opinion. The inference and option to bail out with `any` is nice for some teams in some cases, too. They did an excellent job of making it accessible.

Re: TypeScript 7

#30

Post by raddan »

spankalee wrote: post #24
terpimost wrote: post #12

Are there any plans about wasm version?

Yes, but no official builds yet that I know. This is a really important issue for online playgrounds and IDEs.

I am a little surprised that they rewrote the compiler in Go instead of just compiling the existing compiler to WASM. The linked announcement does not talk about a WASM alternative at all (rewriting a compiler is a risky move!). Does anybody know what the rationale was to do a full rewrite? The article really emphasizes speed, but not much else. Was it Go's concurrency affordances that made the switch worthwhile?
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