Everyone wants to play a major role in (r)evolution of JavaScript. CoffeeScript (http://coffeescript.org/) has already gained some popularity, Google has released its Dart (http://www.dartlang.org/) not that long time ago. Here comes Microsoft (have you noticed that they are always late?), bringing to you…
TADAMMM!
TypeScript! (http://www.typescriptlang.org)
And actually it’s a good stuff (would I bother you if it were otherwise? ;>). What’s so special about it?
- It’s a "strict superset" of JavaScript. That means that every valid JavaScript code is also a valid TypeScript code (so it’s just extends the core syntax, doesn’t substitute it with completely new one).
- It doesn’t need any additional runtime to run (why? check the prev point).
- It introduces static typing (YAY!), classes (wow) and interfaces (WOW).
- Thanks to static typing, it’s far easier to get code completion (IntelliSense) or do more sophisticated code analysis.
- It’s open source.
- It’s self-hosting already (TypeScript compiler is written in TypeScript).
The cool thing is that TypeScript doesn’t have many drawbacks - one worth mentioning is the poor tooling (for now) outside of Windows.
If you want to make your own opinion on TypeScript, here are few interesting links: