Microsoft today announced TypeScript 0.9, the latest version of its JavaScript-related, open-source programming language that compiles to plain JavaScript. In October 2012, Microsoft first introduced TypeScript, which the company said was created to solve a very specific problem: getting JavaScript development to scale.
According to a blog post this morning by S. Somasegar, corporate VP of the developer division at Microsoft, TypeScript enables “application-scale JavaScript, providing high-fidelity interaction with existing JavaScript libraries, and [gives] developers the direct power and flexibility of JavaScript from a language that supports advanced tooling and error detection.”
New in this release is a feature called generics, which Microsoft said was the “most publically requested feature” from 0.8 users. Generics take advantage of the strong type inference that TypeScript already provides, Somasegar said. This, he explained, allows users to have better static-error reporting and richer tooling.
In addition to generics, Somasegar said the language service has been completely rewritten for much-improved interactive performance. He said building Web and Windows Store applications “should now feel more responsive for IntelliSense, code navigation and refactoring, especially as projects grow in size.”
According to Somasegar, TypeScript has already been positively impacting Web development, even as an early technical preview. He said that in the broader JavaScript community, projects such as Turbulenz and Starling.js have leveraged TypeScript as part of new development libraries and kits. Microsoft is also seeing teams building enterprise and consumer applications for the Web, Windows Store and Windows Server—all with TypeScript, he said.
A key reason for TypeScript’s growth, according to Somasegar, is its development as an open-source project hosted on CodePlex. As a result of its openness, he claimed more than a dozen editors now support TypeScript, enabling development with TypeScript in a variety of popular tools and across multiple major platforms.
For more information on the TypeScript 0.9 release, see the TypeScript team blog.
