Microsoft is bulking up TypeScript, adding language features and tooling support to the open source language that compiles to JavaScript and tuning it for large applications.
Version 0.9, announced Tuesday and downloadable at the TypeScript website, improves tooling capabilities offered for TypeScript in the Visual Studio IDE, assisting developers in using the language for large, application-scale JavaScript development. It also features generics, which take advantage of strong type inference and allow developers have better static error reporting and improved tooling, Microsoft said.
"Along with important new language features and improved tooling capabilities in Visual Studio, we've done considerable work to scale the TypeScript language service for large application development, giving developers a smooth, interactive experience regardless of project size," said S. Somasegar, corporate vice president in the Microsoft developer division, in a blog post.
The compiler has been re-engineered to work better with large projects, in which projects exceeding 100,000 lines of code would have minimal slowdown. TypeScript, since its initial release last October, has helped teams write large applications for the Web, servers, and Windows desktop, said Microsoft's Jonathan Turner, on the TypeScript team blog.
"Inside Microsoft, teams in Bing, Team Foundation Server, So.cl, CodePlex, and elsewhere are using TypeScript in production applications, some in excess of 200,000 lines, leveraging TypeScript's ability to scale quickly with the assurances provided by a type system and rich IDE support," Somasegar said. More than a dozen editors now support TypeScript, he said.
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