Where TypeScript Excels

Key Takeaways

[Music] and action hey everyone alex williams from the new stack here for another episode of the new stack shorts today we are talking about typescript the ever popular programming language in particular we're looking at the evolution of types themselves this is all based upon an interview we recently did on the new stack bakers i'm joined today to talk about the future of typescript with luke hobin who is the cto of bellumi and also one of the co-creators of typescript along with him we have daniel rossenwasser who is senior program manager at microsoft on the typescript team and brian kavanagh who was a principal software engineering manager at microsoft javascript became so popular and then people started thinking wait a second i can move these applications that are on the desktop over to the web let's use javascript but it didn't quite do it and so they thought how can we make this better what about types and that's when typescript came into the picture today what we see is a new frontier beyond the browser beyond just applications and into worlds such as infrastructure cloud management how do we give folks the tools to do that when they're targeting the web platform and by the web platform that meant really javascript in the browser and all the richness that that was uh was supporting uh and that you know platform was growing incredibly quickly right html standard was was moving fast at that period of time the ecmascript javascript standard was moving fast at that time this platform was getting very rich a lot of really rich applications were detailed the v8 you know engine and the chakra engine were bringing performance to that platform and so this tooling piece was sort of one big missing part of that but why types is it a security matter we think about security all the time these days it was really about data corruption typescript brings from my perspective on top of that is you know a number of the sort of security issues you end up having you know when you get past sort of off-road runs and that sort of thing which isn't really fundamentally kind of a problem in javascript you then get to more sort of like logic errors that developers may make where they're not you know correctly handling input data uh in a way which uh which they need to to have the right behavior for their their components and types of i think fundamentally helps by you know bringing types bringing static type checking these are tools that fundamentally help developers to sort of create more correct code by default without types there could be inadvertent issues that arise for example you can call parseint and um give it a number and that number will be converted to a string and then back into a number um and you might think that that's a fine thing to do but there are like hostile inputs that can show up here that will not round trip correctly but how do you even trust the types themselves there's an effort called trusted types where basically your server says to the client hey i want you to actually validate that anytime that you're about to put something into a slot in html like that needs to be a validated string in some capacity type doesn't actually help in that capacity directly because that has to be run time and force you need to basically make sure that you're not just arbitrarily putting a chunk of untrusted stuff onto the page but typeshift actually provides really solid tooling early if you're able to leverage that right so if you're able to say that you know in each of these places on the page i need to take a trusted string instead of an actual string well the types of supplements they experience because the actual enforcement is in your browser but you get a hint at right you know when you're editing in your ide your editor or whatever with a little red squiggle saying no you're putting an arbitrary string here but i need something that's actually validated before you do that security is not really like the primary thing but typestrip does provide a better experience and you know some guidelines to help guide you away from some of the pitfalls that you might encounter in javascript in that way today any number of services are built with typescript check out this perspective there's also this effort within microsoft called fluid framework of trying to make it so that you can get something like figma or like you know the collaborative editing in like docs or word or whatever and that's written in text driven so like that's that's a pretty cool use to see like a lot of these newer ideas of opening up new paradigms for people um and kind of lowering the barrier to entry is going to have potential as a first class citizen and also those staffs will probably be written in pedro too right just because the complexity it requires in some cases google's got textured as a first class citizen now like i think most if not all new projects if google are using typescript dropbox whenever i think about this list in my head i'm like who am i forgetting there's someone in many people because it's again it's like who is not using the language and now comes the next frontier for typescript the realm of cloud infrastructure management coming from the co-creator himself languages and in particular typescript are really valuable for cloud infrastructure where folks maybe used to be managing a handful of things just like they used to be managing small scripts in the web browser now they're managing tens of thousands of resources those things are changing quickly they've got real software complexity they've got to manage and so bringing those languages into the infrastructure and cloud management space is increasingly important for organizations that want to sort of get the most value out of the cloud platform typescript is turn complete types are like their own programming language you can run small programs and we've enabled people to write recursive types in a way that that is optimized and allows you to go a little bit farther there right so you can actually do this thing where like you do go through all the letters of a string and parse it out in some cases you know we're not trying to go crazy with it we're just trying to enable the right patterns where you're actually able to express what your javascript is doing at runtime we don't want people to go overboard but we're trying not to like get them stuck in some cases there's this pretty cool feature of like tail call optimization that kind of landed in thai shirt that was sort of like a braggy feature but but it's a thing where like library authors can use it and then everybody else sort of benefits from that but in the end what about types in javascript wouldn't it be cool to just hit f5 to refresh the code but then there's other matters you have to think about what about bundlers and what about how we view types themselves that could take a lot of work our experts say there are really three or four ways to think about types in the browser at the highest level is static verification that really serves as a way to verify a type next down is a runtime check which can show exceptions instead of data corruption and below that would be annotation perhaps most popular of all the ability to show comments that you can read in the source code the sort of annotations only model is the one that looks most likely to be successful you know it's easy to reason about like is a stringer number but when you get into like much more complex types that typescript lets you write um having the runtime evaluate those questions uh in a consistent manner is a lot more difficult not something that there's a lot of appetite for figuring out hey thanks for watching everyone check out our podcasts and new stack makers for the full interview with our typescript experts if you like this video please give us a thumbs up and if you'd like to see more videos like this you can always subscribe to our youtube channel we're on all the major social media platforms you can always find us at the new stack dot io we hope to see you soon [Music]