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Comment by wingspan | Hacker News Reader

Awesome, great to see this finally released. I'm a dev in FUSE Labs (http://fuse.microsoft.com) and we've been dogfooding TypeScript for a while now. I'd be happy to answer any questions about using TypeScript vs vanilla JS, converting a large codebase, etc.

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This is great to hear. I have only just started reading up on TypeScript. But I would love to know if there will be support for a decimal type. I have been following Google's work on Dart and it doesn't look like they will be implementing it last I checked. Such a feature would be a great differentiator.

A team member could comment better than I, but unless TypeScript adds some kind of operator overloading, supporting a new type would be difficult since it compiles to normal JavaScript. Even then, creating a performance decimal type without native code support might be difficult.

Yeah performance is another issue. But providing a type that compiles to a defined type that implements decimal representation would be very useful. GWT pulls off something similar by compiling the Java BigDecimal to a JavaScript equivalent.

How does it compare to Dart & Harmony (even coffeescript)?

I know that is a long answer, but I'd love a bullet point list of how if compares to the other javascript++ languages that have been coming out over the last couple of years.

I'd have to defer this one to the language designers, I'm sure they've done such a comparison.

Per the spec [1]:

  TypeScript syntax includes several proposed features of Ecmascript 6 (ES6), including classes and modules.

[1] http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=267121

I'm wondering how to make use of an existing object system. We already have a JS framework that simulates classes and inheritance in the Java-style OOP.

If you have a small sample, you could try it out in the playground (http://www.typescriptlang.org/Playground/) and see what TypeScript can recognize. Generally, I've seen TypeScript plays well with other OO forms and gives you intellisense on quite a lot.

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