Build: What’s new in TypeScript

So Build is well underway, and I finally got around to diving into some of the talks that are online. One of my early favorites is Anders Hejlsbergs talk on news in TypeScript.  Anders gives a good run through of the TypeScript typesystem, starting with the basics and covering why it is so different from other type systems, and in many ways ground breaking work even for a language designer like him.

A good bit of news that was new to me is that Definitely typed has become the most active repository on github. That speaks volumes about the success of TypeScript. On the back of that Anders demoes tooling that fetches type definitions for npm packages and caches them for you. This is something I have been missing, so I love seeing this feature along with a bunch of nice code suggestions and autocompletion features.

Throughout the talk Anders also gives good examples of some of the new and quite advanced features, such as conditional types and meta programming support, that allow some well known patterns from Javascript to work while still providing precise intellisence. Not only is this nice for us to be able to use, but even more so because it will make experiences with libraries and frameworks better, because they already use these patterns, that now receive even better support in TypeScript. All in all this talks underline the role TypeScript is playing in modern development, and how it continues to conquer new ground around what is possible.