TypeScript 0.9 released

[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.

[stusmall]

I had no idea this was the baby of the Delphi/C# guy. I am super excited now.

[dham]

There's a plugin for Adobe Brackets too.

https://github.com/tomsdev/brackets-typescript-code-intel

Still early

[ixtraz]

It seems to be very close to CoffeeScript, but without this ugly Ruby syntax (for me).

[mseepgood]

> It works on Linux/Mac and SublimeText

A programming language works with a text editor? Wow!

[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 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...

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

[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/

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.

[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!

[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.

[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...

[pjmlp]

Aren't you aware that support is already available since version 12.1.0?

http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/

http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/webhelp/typescript-support.htm...

[giulianob]

The TypeScript tooling is completely open source (and actually written in TypeScript itself). So yeah I think we should see more support for TypeScript as it gains more traction.

[ixtraz]

I will recommend you to try WebStorm Trial by IntelliJ (http://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/)

This is the same as IDEA, but focused on Web Development and releasing new features much-much faster.

But best support offers MIcrosoft's Visual Studio. You could try Visual Studio Web Express (http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/products/visual-st...) if you are using Windows. It's totally free.

[inklesspen]

There is Typescript language support for Emacs and Sublime Text, so there shouldn't really be a problem there; someone just has to do it.

[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.)

[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.

[marshray]

I now work at Microsoft, but was previously a long time developer in the Microsoft ecosystem (primarily C++). I would be the last guy to disagree with your experience and I am telling everyone who will listen internally what it was like to be on the outside.

But the Typescript project has some things going for it:

1. It's open source.

2. It's closely aligned with EC6, the upcoming Javascript standard.

3. It's compatible with existing Javascript libraries.

4. It's useful as it is, to add type checking to Javascript. It doesn't require a massive growing ecosystem to remain viable.

5. The compiler outputs standard idiomatic Javascript, which you could take and run with if you no longer wanted Typescript.

And, yes, there's a Visual Studio plugin for it if that's your cup of tea.

[pjmlp]

Microsoft is no different than any other commercial vendor in terms of tooling.

[egonschiele]

Ouch. Can you give me some examples? A lot of companies have this issue: Google and Apple both dump tech left and right. If it's open source software and it's popular, though, there's a good chance the community will make sure it sticks around.

[michaelwww]

You should call Microsoft and tell them what they will do in the future. They could use a person with your powers of prediction.

[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.

[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.

[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

[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...

[michaelwww]

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

[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 [2]: http://brackets.io/

[michaelwww]

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

[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?

[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

[ixtraz]

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

[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.

[bjhoops1]

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

[zedzed]

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

[ixtraz]

same as for JavaScript

[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.

[RickyShaww]

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

[sunnyujjawal]

will try it also