About the author

In his tech career journey, Muhammad Yasir Rafique has earned a reputation for being focused and efficient. Working as a backend web developer, he has learned a lot about web design, databases, and building web platforms that work like a charm. Assigned as a Full-Time Node.js Backend Developer at Helply he has been responsible for the development of backend functionalities, APIs, and third-party services.

Introduction: A powerful rival for JavaScript

JavaScript remains the gold standard of web development. According to the annual Stack Overflow survey, in 2023, JavaScript became the world’s most commonly used programming language for the 11th year in a row. In 2022, the State of JS Survey found that JavaScript had a 78% usage rate among developers. However, in the last three years, JavaScript has seen its user share slightly decrease, with many industry experts calling it the main reason. This programming language has tripled its userbase in the last six years, finishing at the fifth spot of the most popular programming languages in 2023, according to Stack Overflow. What are the reasons for TypeScript’s meteoric rise in popularity, and will it topple JavaScript from its pedestal? Let’s try to find answers to these questions!

How was TypeScript invented?

The idea of TypeScript emerged as a response to the shortcomings of JavaScript, which affected the applications’ performance as they were growing and becoming increasingly complex. Anders Hejlsberg, the mastermind behind C#, kick-started the development of the new language within Microsoft in 2010. Two years later, TypeScript was open-sourced on GitHub, offering optional static typing and class-based object-oriented programming that JavaScript lacked.

What are the key TypeScript advantages?

Right after its release, TypeScript became a remedy for many software developers who struggled with the maintenance of ever-growing codebases using JavaScript.

Thanks to the option of static typing, TypeScript could detect bugs at compile time, while JavaScript allowed for catching errors only in runtime. This was a development quality leap at the time because developers got an opportunity to prevent many bugs from happening in the development phase, radically reducing the error rate in production. For example, TypeScript would notify a developer if a function received data from the wrong class, preventing the error long before the code is executed.

Typerscript’s static type system enabled it to deeply analyze the codebase. Through integration with Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), TypeScript offered a lot of advanced features, such as autocompletion, real-time type checking, and enhanced refactoring capabilities. With these tools, TypeScript was more accurate in its suggestions and detected errors dynamically.

Additional features enhancing the code quality in TypeScript were interfaces and generics. Interfaces in TypeScript allow for defining contracts within the code and contracts with code outside of a project. This made the codebase better structured and more manageable. Generics gave us a way to create reusable components with multiple data types.

At the same time, TypeScript was compatible with JavaScript, which allowed for adopting it without rewriting existing codebases in JavaScript. This was a strategic advantage because developers could integrate TypeScript gradually without the need for major changes, which often pose big risks. The larger the project, the more severe the risks coming along with massive changes are.

What popular frameworks support TypeScript?

Since its introduction, TypeScript has steadily grown, adding new features and enjoying an increasing community. Perhaps the language’s adoption by major frameworks gave it a serious push on its way to popularity. Today, all the major frameworks for building applications and user interfaces support TyperScript, which accelerates its ascent to the top positions in the carts of the most commonly used programming languages. So what are the frameworks that work with TypeScript?

Angular

The major milestone in the history of TypeScript was Google’s decision to use it as a primary language for development in Angular 2, a follow-up to the wildly popular framework AngularJS. Angular focuses on building large-scale web applications, which means it can benefit a lot from TypeScript’s ability to accelerate and improve the development process by catching errors early on. Thanks to TypeScript’s features, Angular can now provide a well-structured coding environment, which is essential for streamlining the development of complex applications. Needless to say, Angular’s successful adoption of Typerscript has served as a major push for other renowned frameworks to follow suit and start using Typescript in the years to follow.

Vue.js

The rich feature set and tooling set of TypeScript have attracted developers working with Vue.js, a framework for developing advanced user interfaces. Many in the Vue.js community have agreed that TypeScript offers all the means necessary to write predictable and maintainable code, which is a big advantage in the modern development environment. The most beloved features include early error detection and clear code documentation, which both aid in building scalable applications easily.

React

Though React doesn’t require TypeScript, it has become a preferred language for many developers using this library for building user interfaces. TypeScript’s integrated features, in combination with React, accelerate the creation of type-safe elements for single-page applications. Developers especially cherish TypeScript for its tooling support, including autocompletion and advanced refactoring capabilities, which help radically minimize error rates.

What top companies benefit from Typescript?

TypeScript would not have become one of the top five most-used languages if prominent technology companies had not resorted to it to complete their projects. So what companies picked TypeScript for development purposes, and how did they use it?

Microsoft

Being the TypeScript creator, the multinational conglomerate played a central role in its promotion and recognition on the international level. Microsoft has integrated this language across many of its projects, with the most notable being Visual Studio Code. This renowned code editor owes its reliability and efficiency largely to TypeScript's static typing and advanced tooling. Thanks to that, developers using Visual Studio Code enjoy features like better error checking, code refactoring, and easier debugging.

Airbnb

The travel and hospitality industry giant Airbnb switched to TypeScript to counter the problems caused by enduring codebase growth. The company sought a tool that would help it deal with multiplying bugs in large-scale codebases and maintain consistency across its varying projects. Speaking at the JSConf, Airbnb software engineer Brie Bunge named the decreased number of bugs, the improved developer experience, and end-to-end type safety as the top three reasons for the switch to Typescript. She also estimated that Airbnb could have avoided 38% of bugs had it used TypeScript from the start.

Slack

Picking TypeScript, the frontend developers behind the popular messaging platform Slack sought to improve the maintainability of their application. Slack's frontend is critical for the entire business because it is in charge of the user experience, and any error can harm the whole company. The Slack engineers relied heavily on TypeScript's static analysis tools to identify the majority of potential errors before they made it to the production stage. This approach worked, with the number of errors that are detrimental to the user experience falling significantly.

What challenges does TyperScript pose to developers?

Given its utility, TypeScript could have become the dominant web development language by now. However, there are some complexities that may have contributed to the slowdown of its successful spread. One of them is its static nature, which makes it different from dynamic JavaScript. Getting accustomed to this reality may take developers some time before they are able to reap the benefits of this language.

Another hurdle the developers might face is the compilation step. Unlike JavaScript, TypeScript code cannot be executed directly by the browser; it has to be compiled into JavaScript before it can be run. This additional stage prolongs the overall development time, especially in the case of sophisticated and complex projects.

TypeScript integration into existing projects, especially large ones, can be a daring task to complete as well. Developers have to set up configuration files, resolve type errors, and potentially refactor existing code to align with TypeScript’s strict type-checking, which can take a lot of time and resources.

Conclusion: The Future of TypeScript

Still, the difficulties in TypeScript adoption don’t seem to be a lasting barrier to its further ascent to popularity. It has a strong community that relentlessly works to add new features, tools, and integrations with the new frameworks. This will likely eliminate the existing bottlenecks and expand the range of projects TypeScript can be applied to. Given that the industry steers towards type safety and scalability in code, it can be confidently said that TypeScript has a safe place in the future of web development.