> Everything that TS does JS libraries do better
Which ones do you need to do everything TS does?
> without the horrible tradeoffs
Which tradeoffs are horrible?
Which ones do you need to do everything TS does?
> without the horrible tradeoffs
Which tradeoffs are horrible?
I used to be much more bullish on TS, I like the idea of strong typing in general but the more I use TS the more I feel like it's just the worst of both worlds. I much prefer my types to be deeply embedded in the language design, types as varnish don't make sense to me anymore.
The tradeoff is clearly worth it for certain use cases, and clearly not worth it for others. It seems you are discounting and ignoring cases when it is worth it.
Static typing can be a very useful tool especially when the language is designed around it, in TS it is a painful kludge.
But I mean if the biggest complaint you have is that it doesn't run in a browsers REPL console, that feels pretty minor to me. You can easily find TS REPLs all over the web
Edit: if you are asking about chrome debugger, here's a link to some info https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43627243/using-chrome-to...
Also for me, the benefits of a statically typed language on a large team heavily outweighs not having TS in a chrome REPL. It's not even close. Maybe your use case is different, but for me it seems like you're missing the forest for the trees.
I mean yeah, sure, if you have to work on a large team in the browser/node you're going to have to make tradeoffs for that, and using TS seems like it'll help everyone go home at 5. I don't think I'm missing the forest for the trees, we're talking past each-other.
To illustrate a bit further, while I like Rust a lot, (the problems it tackles are MUCH more real than the ones TS does) and I put in the effort to learn and use it on a few personal projects I still find myself reaching for C almost universally these days. Even in the case of Rust's very useful tradeoffs I feel like they cost too much of my freedom, and TS' guarantees are much more surface level for a similar cost.
Together with testing of @example stanzas, you get everything for cheap-ish.
Alas, there is no good JSDoc @example test runner¹. This would be very valuable. If there were, I would let that handle my unit tests and focus only on integration testing.
Edit: runtime type checking at the boundary is also valuable! I've tried runtypes, but actually prefer compiling the ts definitions to JSON Schema with typescript-json-schema, and checking with plain JSON Schema validation.
¹I've used @supabase/doctest-js and jsdoctest, and found both lacking. If you know of a better one, please share!
The advantage to static type checking is that it removes the performance cost of runtime type checking where it's unnecessary; the language's rules make it impossible to build some constructs where the wrong types get mashed together. The tradeoff is that you have to code so the wrong types don't get mashed together (which is, arguably, your goal in the first place).
You can do everything a statically-typed language does in a non-statically-typed language via best practices, but that's a bit like saying you can do everything a compiled language does in assembly via emulating what the compiler would output. In theory, the compiler is saving you the headache of doing that (but depending on the size of what you're trying to write, sometimes it is simpler to write it in JavaScript and skip the type safety. That code is harder to grow, but not all code grows!).
Yes, much of both TypeScript and React are there to minimize performance costs and improve software reliability in tens-of-thousands-of-lines-of-code projects: TypeScript is using static type safety to replace the need for dynamic typechecking (decreasing the expected runtime error rate and the runtime cost of dynamic type analysis; static typing tells you both when you must runtime-coerce types and when such coercion is unnecessary and would waste performance). React is using delta-detection of lighter-weight objects to determine when heavier-weight objects in a declarative user interface API need to be changed, impacting performance (because a handful of equality compares against objects or plain data is a fraction of the cost of repainting every pixel in a table with pixels representing the exact same information as before to the end user).
These are problems people face, but if they are not the problems you're facing, they might not be the tools you need. Not everyone is writing the Facebook UI. There are lighter-weight tools out there that solve similar problems with less complexity (the tradeoff, perhaps, being that if you do find your software needing to scale to handle updates to represent complex, heterogeneous data or infinite streams of information, those tools might not scale easily... But how many people actually have that problem?).
"Use the right tool for the job" is one of the cornerstones of the art of software engineering.