closure-compiler VS assemblyscript

Well, the nice thing with Python types is that the _only_ difference to untyped Python is the type annotations. Last time I worked with TypeScript (two and a half years ago), it felt more like a different language _similar_ to JS. In my experience it was quite... viral. With MyPy I've genuinely seen just specific parts of a code base become typed and didn't notice any friction.

I wonder what would happen if that proposal for type comments in JS went through. Would TypeScript become just a type checker / optimizing compiler?

Google's Closure had an (IMHO) nicer approach (https://github.com/google/closure-compiler/wiki/Types-in-the...), but I don't get the impression it'll ever catch on outside Google.

The most well-known tools that rely on JSDoc are Closure Compiler (not to be confused with the Closure programming language) and TypeScript. Both of these tools can help make your JavaScript typed, but they approach it differently. Closure Compiler primarily focuses on enhancing your .js files by adding typing through JSDoc annotations (after all, they are just comments), while TypeScript is designed for .ts files, introducing its own well-known TypeScript constructs such as type, interface, enum, namespace, and so on.

Closure Compiler follows the same line of thinking:

https://github.com/google/closure-compiler/wiki/FAQ#closure-...

I think only Google Closure Compiler did some optimizations based on its JSDoc-style annotations (see docs). If I remember correctly, types mostly allowed renaming objects' properties across modules, but most other advanced optimizations (like dead code elimination or functions inlining) didn't rely on types. In my experience properties renaming resulted in subtle, hard to discover bugs and I'd say they didn't bring much benefit.

The @template tag is supported by Google Closure Compiler

i'm not sure you want them to write back https://github.com/google/closure-compiler/pull/3958

time to fork

I like your take but JavaScript was literally the assembly language of the web until WASM came along. There was no other language that TypeScript could compile to.

This train of thought lead me to discover AssemblyScript! https://www.assemblyscript.org/

Incidentally, it’s also what AssemblyScript uses: https://github.com/AssemblyScript/assemblyscript/blob/main/s...

Use it as a Front-End for other low-level languages.

> MHO typescript could just cut loose from its javascript compatibility. Why not compile it to wasm instead of transpiling it to javascript?

Check out AssemblyScript which is exactly that:

https://www.assemblyscript.org/

If you're curious, check out AssemblyScript, that might describe better what needs to be cut from TypeScript to make it possible to be compiled to WASM.

This is kinda the idea behind AssemblyScript, but IIRC it's more of a low-level typescript-ish syntax for WebAssembly.

https://www.assemblyscript.org/ maybe, but I'm not sure exactly what you need.

Exactly, WASM was designed to be very very lightweight... you can put a lot of logic into a very small amount of WASM, but you need a good compiler to do that, or write WASM by hand to really feel the benefit. If you just compile Go to WASM, with its GC, runtime and stdlib included in the binary, yeah it's going to be pretty heavy... Rust doesn't have a runtime but as you said, for some reason, produces relatively large binaries (not the case only in WASM by the way). Probably, the best ways to create small WASM binaries is to compile from C or from a WASM-native language like AssemblySCript (https://www.assemblyscript.org).

Well we have all the new ECMA standards that will be introduced in 5 years now. It's looking more like Java actually. its accessor and typing patterns match it the most. TypeScript has had quite the profound influence over future ECMA design. There is a not so well known project called AssemblyScript which I think has a promising future. Since future ecma standards closely resembles it and TypeScripts popularity has exploded I have a feeling it may become a real standard as well.