TypeScript – The Myth of the Superset | Hacker News Reader

TypeScript – The Myth of the Superset

blog.jonasbandi.net

9 pointsjbandi8 comments

At work I needed a fast scripting environment for Android. Not everyone who'd be scripting for the application knew Lua (or Squirrel) so I went with J2V8 (Java bindings for V8).

The first problem I ran into was documenting the API defined on the Java side of things. I tried Jsdoc, but it was cumbersome for what I was trying to do (expose type information).

I tried Typescript on a whim and fell in love with it. The people who only know Js could still use Js, but the Ts scripts so easy to reason about I disabled Js support in my build system (which uses Browserify and some in-house signing tools to compile the script files into one package I can easily load into V8).

The people who were used to Js couldn't just write everything they would Js as this article describes, but what they couldn't write seemed to be stuff that would break a lot of compile time checks. It was a little battle to get one guy to stop using <any> everywhere, but 9/10 times that he came to me with a broken script, it was something that satisfying the compiler without <any> would have found the issue.

And the Java side now looks so much cleaner because we have a compiler that can check that we're sending it the right types, so there isn't as much work trying to cast everything from Object to different representations it could have in Js. I define interfaces that the Java side implements with 'declare' and get that type checking and autocomplete for exploring the API for free, which is another huge win.

I've noticed a lot of JVM-Js integration (Kotlin has Js interop iirc) and I think Typescript is really great there. Flow looked interesting, but it felt like its approach is more targeted towards existing code bases trying to migrate to it, and we didn't have that constraint

I think this is a less relevant issue now that tsc can include plain .js files in builds. I think the spirit of being very close to JavaScript and being easily convertible from one to the other is more important than being a strict superset.

Polymorphism of JavaScript functions is a bit of a pain point in TypeScript, I think.

I often got some query methods, that deliver different types of objects, which share a parent class. Like GameObject, Player, Enemy.

    const player = getGameObject('playerId')

Now player will be typed like the return type of getGameObject. If I now try to set an attribute, specific to `Player`, it will fail:

    player.mousePosition = [1, 2] 
    // won't work, because GameObject doesn't have a mousePosition

Also, setting the type of player to Player, will fail too:

   const player : Player = getGameObject('playerId')
   // getGameObject could return an Enemy

So I have to tell TypeScript, that I know better

   const player = getGameObject('playerId') as Player
   // Forces TypeScript to treat the return value as Player

Why is that last line a problem at all?

It implies that TS doesn't fully understand JS.

I wouldn't say that, that line is pretty much the main value proposition of the language though, is it really "not understanding JS" as much as extending it?

If you really want it to understand Js you could just cast to Any, but to me it's huge that you can do what you do in that last line. Instead of guessing that Player has a mousePosition property, after casting you get told it has one, and get it's exact type.

To me it seemed the other way around. By casting, I'm telling the compiler that it has a mousePosition property.

But I think you're right. This is an simple example and the Player object could have a huge bunch of properties I don't need to guess later, I just need to cast and be done with it.

tl;dr The TypeScript compiler is strict, so it won't let you compile JavaScript that contains what it assumes are mistakes. I love that about TS, and it's one of the main reasons to use it.

The package incompatibility is different, but I've never had trouble using any JS or TS package in TS, so it doesn't seem to be a practical issue.

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