Javascript is an excellent option for building large-scale applications. Companies like Netflix, Slack, Lyft, and Microsoft have adopted it because it has frameworks and tools that make it much easier. One of the most popular is Typescript and there are several reasons for this:
1. Stability and security for the long term
Typescript was released in October 2012 and has been developed and maintained by Microsoft ever since. The company has a clear roadmap for the long term. During this time they have created several tools to make implementation much easier and are compliant to the ECMAScript standard as well.
2. Community
Typescript is an open-source and open-development project used by more than 2 million repositories. In addition, we can see in the 2019 NPM survey that 62% of users reported using it.
3. Learning Curve
Developers experienced with static languages such as Java, C#, and Scala have an advantage; starting with Typescript is going to be easy and won’t take too long to master. On the other hand, developers who have no experience with static types will have to spend more time reviewing concepts related to OOP in order to understand and apply it.
4. Adoption of Javascript ecosystem
The last three years have been important for Typescript. We have seen it adopted by the Javascript community as well as frameworks, text editors and other tools such as Babel, ESLint, and IDEs that make it easier to implement.
5. Closely tracks ECMAScript standard
The ultimate goal of Typescript is not to replace Javascript; rather, it is a helper for building enterprise Javascript apps. That’s why Typescript tracks and provides implementations released by ECMAScript.
From the developer’s perspective, Typescript brings significant advantages when it is taken into account from the beginning of the project. However, it’s worth noting that it’s possible to make the transition progressively.
Here are a few benefits we’ve discovered after using it:
- Typescript saves time.
- Typescript provides flexibility and better readability to the codebase.
- Typescript makes the codebase easier to maintain.
- Typescript helps to understand unknown components and functions through property suggestions, return values, and required params.
- Typescript helps to detect common bugs such as an undefined value, a wrong value, and a missing property.
- Typescript makes for a better self-documented codebase.
To sum up, Typescript is an awesome tool that allows for scale and at the same time makes it easy to maintain. As mentioned at the top, several big tech companies are already using it and here at FullStack Labs, we use it on many of our projects, so why aren’t you?