Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?
Hi there! I work on the TypeScript team and I respect your feedback. Of course I do think TypeScript is worth it, and I&#x27;ll try to address some of the points you&#x27;ve raised with my thoughts.<p>i. Dependency management is indeed frustrating. TypeScript doesn&#x27;t create a new major version for every more-advanced check. In cases where inference might improve or new analyses are added, we run the risk of affecting existing builds. My best advice on this front is to lock to a specific minor version of TS.<p>ii. My anecdotal experience is that library documentation could indeed be better; however, that&#x27;s been the case with JavaScript libraries regardless of types.<p>iii. Our error messages need to get better - I&#x27;m in full agreement with you. Often a concrete repro is a good way to get us thinking. Our error reporting system can often take shortcuts to provide a good error message when we recognize a pattern.<p>iv. Compilation can be a burden from tooling overhead. For the front-end, it is usually less of a pain since tools like esbuild and swc are making these so much faster and seamless (assuming you&#x27;re bundling anyway - which is likely if you use npm). For a platform like Node.js, it is admittedly still a bit annoying. You can still use those tools, or you can even use TypeScript for type-checking `.js` files with JSDoc. Long-term, we&#x27;ve been investigating ways to bring type annotations to JavaScript itself and checked by TypeScript - but that might be years away.<p>I know that these points might not give you back the time you spent working on these issues - but maybe they&#x27;ll help avoid the same frustrations in the future.<p>If you have any other thoughts or want to dig into specifics, feel free to reach out at Daniel &lt;dot&gt; MyLastName at Microsoft &lt;dot-com&gt;.