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Comment by seieste | Hacker News Reader

Typescript seems to be approaching C++ levels of syntax and expressiveness. The main difference seems to be the existing tooling, tutorials, libraries, etc for node.js and others.

But if compiled languages like C++ or Go had as many dedicated libraries for webserver management as JavaScript, would there really be a benefit to using Typescript?

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> Typescript seems to be approaching C++ levels of syntax

I've been a bit traumatized by C++ so I can't help but see this as a bad thing.

A lot of the insanity in C++ is because template metaprogramming made a lot of micro-optimizations possible. You can use CRTP to achieve static polymorphism. You can use SFINAE for tag dispatch to choose a different algorithm at compile time. You can even fold entire algorithms down to a constant with constexpr.

This is great if you care about low level control of your code, but this is usually premature optimization in the JS world.

Luckily typescript will be immune to this because the types can't affect runtime at all. So far I haven't seen any truly monstrous generics that are so prevalent in C++.

There's some Typescript type stuff that can probably get close.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/47914631/1924257

https://stackoverflow.com/a/53229857/1924257

I don't agree - the TypeScript code you link is "complicated" because it's modeling complicated types, or implementing higher-order types which need to handle complicated types. And honestly it's not that complicated - an explanation of what RecursivePartial must do maps closely to the type expression ("each key of the partial type is optional, and each value's keys are also recursively so").

This isn't at all close to CRTP or SFINAE, not just because TS/JS lacks the dispatch features necessary, but because in both cases you link it's still just about type declaration. CRTP and SFINAE are both ways to hack the type system to _run_ differently.

Yes, build times of a few seconds instead of minutes. Easier and more robust "write once, run everywhere". Integrating third party libraries in a matter of minutes instead of hours, sometimes days. Generally much faster prototyping capabilities. And so on.

Short build times come with less compile time checking.

You can get cpp programs down to seconds for incremental builds with good management while having compile time checking.

Yes, because you can't run C++ in the client, while some Node libraries can now use the same code for pre-rendering pages on the server or rendering new pages on the client. This gets you the best of both worlds, where a first load or refresh has the page content baked in like a traditional static site, but once it loads you get faster naetvigation and live content updates.

(WASM and WAPI might eventually let you run WASM-compiled C++ in the client, but there's still a lot up in the air for interop purposes there.)

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