

TypeScript 0.9 released - ixtraz
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/typescript/archive/2013/06/18/announcing-typescript-0-9.aspx

======
nailer
I saw the original announcement of Typescript at JSconf EU last year. It was
an interesting moment: everyone was expecting another Dart, or less (there's a
sea of Macs and most professional JS devs experience of Microsoft is IE) but
stayed to listen to the presentation out of respect for the creator, who also
made Delphi and C#.

Pretty much everyone came out impressed. Typescript is just JS with type
hints, and neat warnings if you send a function something which its signature
doesn't expect.

You can make a JS project a Typescript one immediately, adding type hints as
you go, which for large projects is damn useful. The output, however, is pure
regular old JS.

It's just like a CSS preprocessor, but for JS - transparently adding some
optional awesomeness.

It works on Linux/Mac and SublimeText (albeit you don't get all the VS
Intellisense stuff IIRC) too. I'm looking forward to trying it on a new
project.

~~~
recuter
Typescript is in my peripheral vision so far but that really makes me want to
look into it properly.

How do you think does it fit in with ES6? I feel like we're coming to a point
in time where there should be a major shift in how we write javascript in a
modern way -- so far my thought process has been that Coffescript is a nice
stopgap before ES6 and the dust has almost settled enough to write ES6 first
sorta..

Bit of a ramble. Interesting times.

~~~
ixtraz
They are aiming to bring ES6 into today development so they looks into ES6
specs very often.

~~~
marshray
Yes, when the team is interviewed they consistently say that, where there is
overlap, Typescript will adapt to follow ES6 standards once agreed upon.

------
marshray
Typescript is closely integrated with Node.js at this point.

So there's this related open source project seeking to optimize the
performance of Node.js apps running on IIS and hosting them on Azure.
[https://github.com/tjanczuk/iisnode/wiki](https://github.com/tjanczuk/iisnode/wiki)
We've seen some interesting performance gains by supplanting Node.js's HTTP
implementation with the in-kernel HTTP stack, http.sys.
[http://tomasz.janczuk.org/2012/08/the-httpsys-stack-for-
node...](http://tomasz.janczuk.org/2012/08/the-httpsys-stack-for-nodejs-apps-
on.html)

Disclosure: I work for Microsoft. I personally found this interesting.

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ixtraz
TypeScript is a language for application-scale JavaScript development.
TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain
JavaScript. Any browser. Any host. Any OS. Open Source.

(C) [http://www.typescriptlang.org/](http://www.typescriptlang.org/)

Btw, I've used it a lot, feel free to ask any questions.

~~~
turingbook
I wonder if there are any ugly things or traps in programming TypeScript.

~~~
michaelwww
The JavaScript gotchas will still getcha, such as variable hoisting. I tend to
forget they are still there when working in TypeScript, but that's my fault.

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egonschiele
I am very excited by Typescript. I think JS was badly in need of some better
typing. This release looks like it adds a lot: overloading on constants,
enums, and generics will all lead to better typing. Never thought I'd say it,
but thanks, Microsoft!

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ktavera
We've been building a large scale application in Typescript for about 6 months
and it is great. These new features in 0.9 are awesome.

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tieTYT
I want this so bad, but I want to type it in my IDE of choice: Intellij
IDEA/(or Eclipse, to play the devil's advocate).

Is there any legal reason why someone couldn't create a plugin for those Java
ides to compile TypeScript?

~~~
SystemOut
IntelliJ has support for Typescript. I'm not sure if this is the level of
support you're looking for but it seems like it should be sufficient.

[http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/webhelp/typescript-
support.htm...](http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/webhelp/typescript-support.html)

~~~
tieTYT
Whoa, thank you sir. I assumed it didn't support it because I couldn't find a
Typescript plugin when I searched their repository. I didn't think it would
just be built in.

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michaelwww
I use both TypeScript and Dart for different uses cases (Dart lacks IE8
support) and both are a joy to use compared to POJS (plain old JavaScript.)

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DonnyV
I've been burned way too many times with Microsoft and there technology. I
suggest that no one build any long lasting apps with this. They will dump it
when something new and shiny comes along. Unless its based on C# or uses
Visual Studio don't use it.

~~~
sivam
Microsoft didn't kill Silverlight, the iPad killed Silverlight. As for VB6, I
think many here would agree that it was better off killed. You can still run
VB6 apps on even Windows 8 though.

~~~
akgoel
I disagree. Microsoft killed Silverlight. Your iPad argument means that we
should all just skip native development and stick with HTML5.

Either Silverlight or WPF should be the favored Windows desktop development
environment. Instead, they are both EOL and the incomplete Metro environment
is the current way to do Windows desktop development.

In fact, if you are a Microsoft developer, you've lost Win32, MFC, ATL,
WinForms, WPF, and Silverlight. The Windows desktop developer currently is
waiting to see how Metro improves.

~~~
cosmotriton
Um... Without Win32 there is no WinRT (do you think Windows isn't Windows
anymore because of the advent of a new touch-first user experience and app
model (with a centralized app store with simple and predictable app
install/uninstall/update mechanics)?)

Without Win32 there is no Windows shell, touch first or not... There is no
Visual Studio, Office, Photoshop, Premiere, etc, etc... You can have something
new, different and still have what has always been there. This is what
compatibility is all about... Can you run Windows 7 (and Windows XP)
applications on Windows 8? Yes, of course you can.

Don't mistake the things you can't do in the WinRT environment (Win32 APIs you
can't call, for example) with the end of those things (and what they are a
part of)... MFC shipped a new version in 2012. WPF is at version 4.5. ATL is
just a "high" level way to program COM just like WinRT, in fact... You don't
need ATL any time you program to a COM-based ABI. You don't need WPF to build
XAML-based WinRT apps. On x86 machines, there is a desktop for a reason and
the reason is the same as it's always been.

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euroclydon
This is good work! I hope they make an update to Visual Studio that supports
all source maps, not just those generated by the TypeScript compiler.

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ww520
This looks very interesting. Any chance it would compile to asm.js? That would
be awesome.

~~~
ixtraz
They are going to make it happen.

[http://typescript.codeplex.com/discussions/438243](http://typescript.codeplex.com/discussions/438243)

~~~
dangoor
The trouble is that, at the moment, asm.js is not a garbage collected
environment, whereas TypeScript is much closer to JS than it is to C.

Static typing alone is not sufficient to make asm.js a good target for a
language, I think.

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marshray
Looks like there's an interview video just up with Anders Hejlsberg and the
Typescript team.

[http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/Anders-Hejlsberg-
Stev...](http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/Anders-Hejlsberg-Steve-Lucco-
and-Luke-Hoban-Inside-TypeScript-09)

~~~
michaelwww
I like it that Anders said "We've had kind of a mantra - we don't mangle your
code."

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dangoor
For people looking for an editor in which to try out TypeScript, I'll note
that there's a neat looking community-written TypeScript extension[1] for
Brackets[2]. (I work on Brackets).

I've been using dynamically typed languages consistently since 2005, but I'm
curious to give TypeScript a try to see how it feels. The last statically
typed language I used was Java (2004), and that was not a wholly pleasant
experience.

[1]: [https://github.com/tomsdev/brackets-typescript-code-
intel](https://github.com/tomsdev/brackets-typescript-code-intel) [2]:
[http://brackets.io/](http://brackets.io/)

~~~
michaelwww
I really like the Brackets editor, but the TypeScript extension is still 0.8
isn't it?

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ycner
If the selling point for TypeScript is adding static types/analysis to
JavaScript, do we expect that it is the trend that other popular dynamic
languages e.g. python/ruby/php will likely follow?

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ixtraz
For node.js developers:

If you don't want to recompile it every time, you could just use better-
require module: [https://github.com/olalonde/better-
require](https://github.com/olalonde/better-require)

~~~
ixtraz
Or if you want to do it automatically, you could use Mimosa.js as well
([http://mimosajs.com/](http://mimosajs.com/))

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programminggeek
I think TypeScript is a cool idea, but I actually want runtime type checking.
I don't know how many developers code with "design by contract" where you have
contracts enforced not just at compile time, but at runtime. It allows for
some incredibly smart, pluggable systems. I really don't know why there isn't
more done with runtime type checking in various dynamic languages.

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bjhoops1
The addition of export = is great. This was a glaringly obvious deficiency
that I'm glad they resolved.

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zedzed
Does anyone know of any good examples of larger scale TypeScript application
architecture?

~~~
ixtraz
same as for JavaScript

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serkanyersen
is it just me or Microsoft is slowly converting Javascript into C#? Don't get
me wrong I like typescript but next thing you know we have .NETJS floating
around :)

~~~
miohtama
I think major difference here is that Microsoft actually tries to play nice
with the existing ecosystem

\- Follow EcmaScript6 development path

\- Using NodeJS as the base for the language service

\- Providing plugins for various editors

\- Be superset of JavaScript - you can (almost) directly drop any JS code to
TypeScript

After all these years it almost looks like Microsoft has learnt its lessons
and sees there is more than Windows Server out there.

~~~
miohtama
Actually my major grief is that they are using Microsoft's Codeplex software
repository services which feel little old fashioned and cumbersome after all
Github hipstering :)

~~~
ixtraz
but they use git as well, so you could easily set up a mirror on github.

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RickyShaww
This is great. The generics seems to be a very useful feature.

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sunnyujjawal
will try it also

