TypeScript is a Superset of JavaScript TC39, the committee that regulates the development of JavaScript, has introduced new features to the language with each release version. Recently added features such as classes and block-scoped variables make standard JavaScript more robust. However, the language can be further enhanced and hardened to handle highly complex architectural demands in a reliable and predictable way. TC39 oftentimes has features in its pipeline that would help achieve that architectural goal but it takes time for them to become part of the standard language and to be supported by all major browsers.

As each new version of JavaScript extends the previous one, we could think of “Future JavaScript” as a superset of the current standard one. With that model in mind, TypeScript was created to act as that superset of JavaScript that puts the future of the language in the hands of today’s developers. Moreover, TypeScript integrates features outside of the scope of TC39, such as type-checking, generics and interfaces, that mitigate many points of failure present in JavaScript and rev up development - all provided through abstractions written in JavaScript. All that TypeScript gives you is convenient syntactic sugar that eventually gets all converted to cross-platform JavaScript.

Let’s explore in detail the architecture and components of TypeScript to understand its benefits deeply.

TypeScript provides compile time type safety for your JavaScript code. This is no surprise given its name. The great thing is that the types are completely optional. Your JavaScript code .js file can be renamed to a .ts file and TypeScript will still give you back valid .js equivalent to the original JavaScript file. TypeScript is intentionally and strictly a superset of JavaScript with optional Type checking.

The syntactic sugar provided by TypeScript will allow us to reduce the footprint of our code significantly while increasing its expressiveness. TypeScript makes writing class object-oriented code a breeze. It provides us with classes, interfaces and modules that allow us to properly structure our code in encapsulated reusable structures that makes it easy to maintain and scale. Within classes, we are also able to specify the visibility level of class properties and methods by using TypeScript provided modifiers -public,private andprotected. There are many other abstractions that will make us happy and productive developers!

How to install

The easiest way to get TypeScript up and running is by installing its standalone compiler (tsc) globally via a Node.js package manager such as npm or yarn.

OR

Once this global installation of the TypeScript compiler is complete, we have access to the tsc command from our terminal that allow us to compile .ts files into .js ones. We can verify the success of our compiler installation by running the following command to check its version:

The TypeScript compiler comes with many options that we’ll be exploring as we move forward.