I was talking to my manager the other day, discussing the languages we are using at $dayjob. He kind of offhandedly said that he thinks TypeScript is a temporary fad and soon everything will go back to using JavaScript. He doesn’t like that it’s made by Microsoft either.

I’m not a frontend developer so I don’t really know, but my general impression is that everything is moving more and more towards TypeScript, not away from it. But maybe I’m wrong?

Does anyone who actually works with TypeScript have any impression about this?

  • @TCB13English
    1•9 months ago

    That’s not a solution, it is the exact opposite - adding even more compilation and complexity to things. The ideia is to move away from compiled stuff as much as possible. WebAssembly makes sense for very complex and low level stuff that you can’t run interpreted with reasonable performance.

    Less compilation usually equals code more maintainable in the long run. Think about it: if you don’t need a compiler and the hundreds of dependencies that will eventually break things will last way more time. Websites from the 90’s still work fine on modern browsers and you can update them easily while compiled stuff is game over once you lose the ability to install run said compiler and related dependencies.

    • @[email protected]OP
      1•9 months ago

      Think about it: if you don’t need a compiler and the hundreds of dependencies that will eventually break things will last way more time.

      You can have hundreds of dependencies whether you use a compiled or interpreted language, that really has nothing to do with that.

      Also compilation has lots of benefits, including being able to do lots of static analysis to find bugs. I definitely don’t agree that we should move away from compilation in general or WebAssembly specifically. WebAssembly doesn’t have to be only used for low level stuff, you can write your code in a high level language and compile to WebAssembly just fine.