History
TypeScript was released to the public in October 2012, with version 0.8, after two years of internal development at Microsoft. Soon after the initial public release, Miguel de Icaza praised the language, but criticized the lack of mature integrated development environment (IDE) support apart from Microsoft Visual Studio, which was unavailable then on Linux and macOS. As of April 2021 there is support in other IDEs and text editors, including Emacs, Vim, WebStorm, Atom and Microsoft's own Visual Studio Code. TypeScript 0.9, released in 2013, added support for generics. TypeScript 1.0 was released at Microsoft's Build developer conference in 2014. Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 provided built-in support for TypeScript. Further improvement were made in July 2014, when the development team announced a new TypeScript compiler, asserted to have a five-fold performance increase. Simultaneously, the source code, which was initially hosted on CodePlex, was moved to GitHub. On 22 September 2016, TypeScript 2.0 was released, introducing several features, including the ability for programmers to optionally enforce null safety, to mitigate what's sometimes referred to as the billion-dollar mistake. TypeScript 3.0 was released on 30 July 2018, bringing many language additions like tuples in rest parameters and spread expressions, rest parameters with tuple types, generic rest parameters and so on. TypeScript 4.0 was released on 20 August 2020. While 4.0 did not introduce any breaking changes, it added language features such as Custom JSX Factories and Variadic Tuple Types. TypeScript 5.0 was released on 16 March 2023 and included support for decorators. On March 11, 2025, Anders Hejlsberg announced on the TypeScript blog that the team is working on a Go port of the Ty
Design
TypeScript originated from the shortcomings of JavaScript for developing large-scale applications both at Microsoft and among their external customers. Challenges with dealing with complex JavaScript code led to demand for custom tooling to ease developing of components in the language. Developers sought a solution that would not break compatibility with the ECMAScript (ES) standard and its ecosystem, so a compiler was developed to transform a superset of JavaScript with type annotations and classes (TypeScript files) back into vanilla ECMAScript 5 code. TypeScript classes were based on the then-proposed ECMAScript 6 class specification to make writing prototypal inheritance less verbose and error-prone, and type annotations enabled IntelliSense and improved tooling.
Features
JavaScript syntax § TypeScript-specific features TypeScript adds the following syntax extensions to JavaScript: Type signatures (annotations) and compile-time type checking Type inference Interfaces Enumerated types Generics Namespaces Tuples Explicit resource management Syntactically, TypeScript is very similar to JScript .NET, another Microsoft implementation of the ECMA-262 language standard that added support for static typing and classical object-oriented language features such as classes, inheritance, interfaces, and namespaces. Other inspirations include Java and C#.
Compatibility with JavaScript
JavaScript As TypeScript is simply a superset of JavaScript, existing JavaScript can be adapted to TypeScript and TypeScript program can seamlessly consume JavaScript. The compiler can target all ECMAScript versions 5 and above, transpiling modern features like classes and arrow functions to their older counterparts. With TypeScript, it is possible to use existing JavaScript code, incorporate popular JavaScript libraries, and call TypeScript-generated code from other JavaScript. Type declarations for these libraries are usually provided with the source code but can be declared or installed separately if needed.
Development tools
List of TypeScript software and tools Compiler The TypeScript compiler, named tsc, is written in TypeScript. As a result, it can be compiled into regular JavaScript and can then be executed in any JavaScript engine (e.g. a browser). The compiler package comes bundled with a script host that can execute the compiler. It is also available as a Node.js package that uses Node.js as a host. The compiler is currently being rewritten in Go for version 7. The compiler can target a given edition of ECMAScript (such as ECMAScript 5 for legacy browser compatibility), but by default compiles for the latest standards. IDE and editor support Microsoft provides a plug-in for Visual Studio 2012 and WebMatrix, full integrated support in Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio 2015, and basic text editor support for Emacs and Vim. Visual Studio Code supports TypeScript in addition to several other languages, and offers features like debugging and intelligent code completion. alm.tools is an open source cloud IDE for TypeScript built using TypeScript, ReactJS and TypeStyle. JetBrains supports TypeScript with code completion, refactoring and debugging in its IDEs built on IntelliJ platform, such as PhpStorm 6, WebStorm 6, and IntelliJ IDEA, as well as their Visual Studio Add-in and extension, ReSharper 8.1. Atom has a TypeScript plugin with support for code completion, navigation, formatting, and fast compilation. The online Cloud9 IDE and Codenvy support TypeScript. A plugin is available for the NetBeans IDE. A plugin is available for the Eclipse IDE (version Kepler) TypEcs is available for the Eclipse IDE. The Cross Platform Cloud IDE Codeanywhere supports TypeScript. Webclipse An Eclipse plugin designed to develop TypeScript and Angular 2. Angular IDE A standalone IDE available via npm to develop TypeScript and Angular 2 applications, with integrated
Release history
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