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Node.js adds experimental support for TypeScript

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Re: Node.js adds experimental support for TypeScript

#51

Post by shepherdjerred »

Shacklz wrote: post #33
just-tom wrote: post #26

Nice, but without support for Enums, for me it's mostly useless.

In our codebase we started to disallow enums in favour of string literal types, and once folks get over the ingrained "this needs to be an enum" (coming mostly from other languages like Java), it's not much missed. Enums are one of the very few things in typescript that seem to not have turned out that well, but it's relatively easy to work without them with string-literable types and such, derived from some const in…

100% agree. Coming from Java I really wanted an Enum type, but string literals/discriminated unions fill that niche just fine.

Re: Node.js adds experimental support for TypeScript

#52

Post by spankalee »

dgellow wrote: post #43
spankalee wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This proposal aims to enable developers to add type annotations to their JavaScript code, allowing those annotations to be checked by a type checker that is external to JavaScript. At runtime, a JavaScript engine ignores them, treating the types as comments.

Yes, that’s explaining what type erasure is. “type as comments” is what Flow supports, literal comments for type annotations. I think we disagree on the terminology but agree on the goal of the proposal

"types as comments" is the term that the champions and reviewers of this proposal have been using.

It refers to how the types are parsed: aside from some kind of standard start and end delimiters, the parser does not try to parse the expression-level type syntax. Type expressions are just strings of characters. This way you can have basically any syntax at all for types.

Re: Node.js adds experimental support for TypeScript

#53

Post by jaggederest »

josephg wrote: post #47
pphysch wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In Python, I've even heard of people writing types in source code but never checking them This is my main approach. Type hints are wonderful for keeping code legible/sane without going into full static type enforcement which can become cumbersome for rapid development.

You can configure typescript to make typing optional. With that option set, you can literally rename .js files to .ts and everything "compiles" and just works. Adding this feature to nodejs means you don't even have to set up tsc if you don't want to. But if I were putting in type hints like this, I'd still definitely want them to be statically checked. Its better to have no types at all than wrong types.

Yeah I start projects by explicitly typing `any` all over the place and gradually refining things, so every type that's specified is explicit and checked, I'm really enjoying that style.

Re: Node.js adds experimental support for TypeScript

#54

Post by tylerchilds »

dgellow wrote: post #38
tylerchilds wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i’m not sure i buy the “company floods the industry with broken tooling and deserves to be standardized” narrative. yeah, the ecosystem sucks, but rewarding the system incentivized to co-opt the system will actually make things worse in the long run, not better. for example, internet explorer failed why?

What broken tooling are you talking about? tsc is broken? IE failed because it was a horrible browser that didn’t evolve for years and was incompatible with major web standard developments. Nothing to do with typescript, an open source, best in class type system and type checker.

IE failed because they tried to define the standard as themselves. i argue we’re witnessing that again from the same company that only gave up that strategy once they had typescript, github, npm locked in.

i’m not bullish on political strategies being technical solutions, which is the premise.

typescript has nothing to do with internet explorer, true, but is it really not obvious that it is the same tactic as a different brand? become the standard, steer the committee.

and broken in that copying code between systems requires compatibility between configurations, which should be a red flag for any language.

Re: Node.js adds experimental support for TypeScript

#55

Post by mattnewton »

winter_blue wrote: post #35
pansa2 wrote: post #34

If Node.js can run TypeScript files directly, then the TypeScript compiler won't need to strip types and convert to JavaScript - it could be used solely as a type checker. This would be similar to the situation in Python, where type checkers check types and leave them intact, and the Python interpreter just ignores them. It's interesting, though, that this approach in Python has led to several (4?) different popular…

Flow (by Facebook) used to be fairly significant in the JavaScript several years ago, but right now it's somewhat clear that TypeScript has won rather handily.

Before that there was the closure compiler (Google) which had type annotations in comments. The annotation syntax in comments was a little clunky but overall that project was ahead of it's time. Now I believe even inside google that has been transpiled to typescript (or typescript is being transpiled to closure, I can't remember which - the point is that the typescript interface is what people are using for new code).

Re: Node.js adds experimental support for TypeScript

#56

Post by tstrimple »

yashap wrote: post #46
Shacklz wrote: post #28

I'm honestly giddy. This could be the (slow) beginning of a new era, where "JS with types" is finally a native thing. I'm even willing to forgive all the mess that CJS vs. ESM is if they manage to pull this off. I hope this sees widespread adoption/usage, which might finally cause some movement to integrate TS into ecmascript after all. Some dynamically-typed language fanatics (which are, in my opinion, completely de…

Yeah, my personal experience is that easily 95% of devs I work with/have met in person, if not closer to 99%, prefer statically typed languages. Maybe that’s a biased sample, but I do think the overall preference among devs is very strong. I also see JS slowly, more-or-less becoming TypeScript over time.

My days of being a real software developer are long behind me. So I'm totally willing to accept that I'm wrong here. But when I build a POC in particular, there's a LOT of power and flexibility granted by not giving a fuck about types. Suddenly I can accept non well defined data types (depending on my implementation) and can persist data that otherwise would have taken code changes and approval processes to accept. I do believe there is a place for types, but to type all the things is folly. There are capabilities within JavaScript to handle both.

Re: Node.js adds experimental support for TypeScript

#57

Post by LoganDark »

mattnewton wrote: post #55
winter_blue wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flow (by Facebook) used to be fairly significant in the JavaScript several years ago, but right now it's somewhat clear that TypeScript has won rather handily.

Before that there was the closure compiler (Google) which had type annotations in comments. The annotation syntax in comments was a little clunky but overall that project was ahead of it's time. Now I believe even inside google that has been transpiled to typescript (or typescript is being transpiled to closure, I can't remember which - the point is that the typescript interface is what people are using for new code)…

Oh, Closure Compiler is such a throwback. I still remember staring at the project page on Google Code. Isn't it like two decades old or even older by this point? Is it still alive?

Re: Node.js adds experimental support for TypeScript

#58

Post by sholladay »

yamumsahoe wrote: post #10
rockwotj wrote: post #4

My favorite deno feature is coming to node directly. Awesome! Maybe this means I don't always have to install esbuild to strip types - very excited how this will make writing scripts in TypeScript that much easier to use. I lately have been prefering Python for one off scripts, but I do think personally TypeScript > Python wrt types. And larger scripts really benefit from types especially when looking at them again a…

correction: the only deno future that i want

Deno has so many other great features. Most web standard APIs are available in Deno, for example. It can do URL imports. It has a built in linter, formatter, and test framework. Built in documentation generator. A much better built in web server.

Node is copying many of these features to varying degrees of success. But Deno is evolving, too.

Re: Node.js adds experimental support for TypeScript

#60

Post by storafrid »

I have mixed feelings about this. While I do use TS with Node.js today and absolutely like the concept, its type system is still far from something mature and stable like C#. We keep running into ceilings (EDIT: lack of completeness/depth, not lack of complexity) all the time, and TypeScript questions on Stack Overflow is basically a library of workarounds. Mostly bad ones. So if I worked on Node.js I would prefer it to evolve more before actually marrying and having kids with it. But at the same time, I like the direction Node.js is taking.
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