This post looks at the Closure Compiler, Google's tool from the mid-2000s for adding types to JavaScript. It looks at how its focus on minification led to very different design choices than TypeScript, and how this and a few other factors led to TypeScript becoming the ubiquitous solution for JavaScript + types. The Closure Compiler represents an alternative path that JavaScript could have taken, and it gives us perspective on TypeScript as it exists today.
  • @[email protected]English
    1•1 year ago

    Having used the Closure compiler quite a lot, my main impression of it is that it’s pretty painful to use compared to Typescript. It was especially awful before ES6 because your files would be full of lines like

    fully.qualified.class.Name.prototype.methodName = function(...) {

    It was just genuinely hard to read and obnoxious to write.