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Microsoft launches a simpler & faster strongly-typed-JavaScript

Billy Yann
Data Scientist
Deep learning and machine learning specialist, well-versed with experience in Cloud infrastructure, Block-chain technologies, and Big Data solutions.
February 05, 2023


JavaScript or JS

JavaScript (JS) is a compiled programming language used as a foundation for many software algorithms. It is lightweight and gets interpreted as a just-in-time compiled programming language with various first-class functions. JavaScript gets well-known as a scripting language used to design websites. Apart from the websites, developers use JS for several non-browser environments as well. These include Node.js, Apache CouchDB, and Adobe Acrobat. JavaScript got developed as a prototype-based multi-paradigm and single-threaded dynamic language. It supports various functional programming styles that include the following: object-oriented, declarative, and imperative. JavaScript rose to prominence due to its dynamic capabilities, which include Runtime Object Consideration with certain variable parameter lists. These include function variables, creating dynamic scripts, object introspection, object utilities, and source code recovery. Usually, the JavaScript functions store the source text, which gets easily retrieved through a particular string function. To learn more about JavaScript functions, one should understand the nuances involved. It gets dedicated to the JS language itself. Here, the standards of JavaScript include ECMAScript Language Specification and the ECMAScript Internationalization API Specification. It should get noted that JavaScript is not the same as the Java Programming Language as both Java and JS are registered trademarks of Oracle in the US and other nations. These two programming languages have very different syntax, semantics, and uses. A JavaScript Documentation of Core Language features includes the JavaScript guide and the JavaScript references. For successful implementation of JavaScript, four logical operators get used and include OR, AND, NOT, and Nullish Coalescing. In classical programming using JS, the logical OR manipulates the Boolean Values as the operator is a little bit trickier while being very powerful. The logical AND returns “true” if both the involved operands are true and false otherwise. The NOT operator accepts a single argument and does the following: converts the operand to a Boolean type and returns the inverse value. Nullish Coalescence deals with the null coefficients involved within JavaScript. All these get used diligently to design a software algorithm that forms the basis of a website design using the JavaScript language.

Strongly typed JavaScript Variant – TypeScript

TypeScript, a variation of the JS programming language, revolutionizes the programming language and web design sector. It adds some vital features essential for Enterprise Development. The main characteristic of TypeScript is that it is Strongly Typed JavaScript. Thus, with TypeScript, the programmers and developers get to declare several variables and other data structures. These get defined as specific types such as Booleans or Strings. Here, TypeScript checks the values for validity, which is never possible with loosely typed JavaScript. Keen observations show that the strong and powerful typing of TypeScript enables several vital features that help developers to design more productive software programs, algorithms, and website designs. It is helpful especially while dealing with large enterprise-scale codebases. Interestingly, TypeScript gets compiled and definitely does not get interpreted like JavaScript. Thus, any type of error gets caught before the execution of TypeScript. Also, IDEs that perform background incremental compilation catch errors while coding, which makes it easier to rectify. With all these vital differences, TypeScript gets executed anywhere JavaScript can run. The main reason that allows this feature is that TypeScript does not compile to binary executables but to standard JavaScript or JS.

TypeScript versus JavaScript or JS

TypeScript got designed and developed as a superset of JavaScript. Essentially, TypeScript code has several extra features that are not the part of JavaScript. TypeScript supports type inferences that include all types for every possible type. It means that the variables do not have to be explicitly assign their type, by a programmer. TypeScript gets designed for Object-Oriented Language and certain concepts like inheritance and access control that is not intuitive with JS gets easily implemented in TypeScript. With TypeScript one can implement interfaces, which is not possible using JS. However, one cannot code in TypeScript or JS as TypeScript is not compiled in a conventional sense. The TypeScript compiler transcodes TypeScript Code into functionally equivalent JavaScript, and the resulting JS gets run anywhere through JS code runs, from a web browser to a Node.js equipped server. So, TypeScript is a great way to generate JS code.

The purpose of TypeScript

TypeScript got developed by Microsoft and was released as an Open Source in 2012. For competing with Google, Microsoft developed TypeScript as with this programming language, it is easier to design enterprise-grade applications that run in a JavaScript Environment. TypeScript is essentially a Scalable JavaScript as advertised by Microsoft. Research and experiments showcase that TypeScript is better than plain JavaScript or JS. Typescript can get installed as a plugin for the IDE of choice, and it provides the tooling benefits. As TypeScript got designed and developed by Microsoft, it gets associated with high-quality plugins available for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. It is an Open Source Project and so, TypeScript can get adapted everywhere from Open Source IDEs like Eclipse to ancient text editors like VIM.

TypeScript Types

Without a doubt, the most important feature in TypeScript is the Type system. The language supports various systems that include: Boolean – simple true or false values, Floating Point Value numbers with no integers and it supports decimal, hexadecimal, binary & octal literals, String of text data, Arrays and Tuples, Enums, Arbitrary variables, Object Type which is not primitive, and Code Snippet Types among others. TypeScript types get set by inferences as well.

TypeScript Interface

The interfaces of TypeScript allow the users to define their own types. Here, an interface establishes the properties of an object and all the types associated with properties. TypeScript shares its generics with object-oriented languages like Java and C#. In object-oriented programming, classes inherit functionality and act as building blocks of objects. Classes are a part of TypeScript and it uses the same syntax as JS. TypeScript has many versions until now.

TypeScript 5.0 Retools Decorators

The latest forthcoming upgrade to TypeScript 5.0 Retools Decorators by Microsoft, the strongly typed JavaScript now in beta, promises and shapes up to be smaller, faster, and simpler. Recently, Microsoft published a beta release of TypeScript 5.0, which is the strongest typed JavaScript variant of Microsoft, on January 26, 2023. Here, the new release aims to modernize retools decorators for class automations as part of revolutionizing and simplifying TypeScript to be more competent against Google.

Information shows that the decorators, an upcoming ECMAScript Feature allow for customizing classes and the associated members in a very reusable way. This is how Microsoft noted in a blog post announcing the release of TypeScript 5.0. The decorators get used on various methods, properties, getters, setters, and auto accessors. The classes get decorated for sub-classing and registration purposes.

Previously, TypeScript supported several experimental decorators, which were modeled on a much older version of the proposals for the decorators. In TypeScript 5.0, the programmers and developers have provisions to add a const modifier to a type parameter declaration. It helps to cause const-like inferences to become default ones.

The latest update allows the extends field to take multiple entries as it makes all Enums into union ones by creating a unique type for each computed member. Thus, all Enums get narrowed with their members referred or referenced as types.

TypeScript 5.0 currently features various changes across code structure, data structures, and algorithmic extensions. These are intended to speed up the wholesome experiences that use JavaScript and its installation.

Thus, overall, TypeScript 5.0 gets designed to make the language smaller, faster, and simpler as mentioned before.

A release candidate of an extension to TypeScript 5.0 is expected on February 28, 2023, followed by general availability of a production release on March 14, 2023.

Features of TypeScript 5.0

A better support gets offered for ESM or ECMAScript Module Projects in Node and Bundlers. A verbatimModuleSyntax capability of TypeScript 5.0 simplifies the imports and exports while keeping these imports or exports without a type modifier. Here a new JSDoc tag, @satisfies, catches or filters the type mismatches while preserving the original type of an expression. It enables the developers to use various values more precisely in code generation and codes. Here, many developers use TypeScript to type-check JavaScript code that uses the JSDoc annotations. The JSDoc now declare various overloads with a new @overload tag. The correctness changes and various depreciations get offered for less-used flags. Currently, TypeScript targets ECMAScript 2018 and for Node Users, it means a minimum version requirement of Node.js 10. Also, the TypeScript 5.0 beta follows the November 2022 release of TypeScript 4.9 that features a satisfies-operator to catch errors.

Conclusion

Many software developers work on large enterprise projects and it facilitates code reuse as projects grow in size. TypeScript is ideal to use when the enterprise features and tooling of a language is just like Java, but need to execute the code in a JavaScript environment. TypeScript has a great trick with which one can set the compiler to target a specific JavaScript runtime environment, browser or language version.