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k__

The thing with 3rd party libs is, often there are no type defs, especially bleeding edge stuff :/

Also VSC often is flunky with picking up defs... sometimes you open a file and some are missing.

Or imports with numbers don't work.

On the other hand, using big libs like babylonjs is charming with all the auto complete :)

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Not even Microsoft's own JavaScript libraries (e.g. Excel) have first-party type defs, at least as of a few months ago. Making matters worse, that aforementioned Excel library has polymorphic parameters everywhere. We gave it a shot with ng2 on a one-off, but honestly TypeScript just slowed us down and the juniors tried sneaking "Any spam" through code reviews.

It's not a problem. You can resort to any type and works with 3rd party stuff like with normal JS code.

Yes, I can write my own types, but typing isn't always easy. Especially with advanced techniques like parametric polymorphism etc.

No, I think solomatov is saying you can always use the 'any' type built-in to TypeScript. You can always do:

    declare var fancyNewLib: any;

    fancyNewLib('hello');
    fancyNewLib.someCoolFeature = 3;

You don't get any suggestions or typechecking (obviously), but you're no worse off than just using JS in that sense. And you can easily replace your 'declare' with the actual // <reference> tag when you find it or make it, and clean up any errors.

Ah, yes, that's what I'm doing most of the time. But like you said it's no better than using JS directly, haha.

Just changing the file extension from js to ts will often bring out bugs in your code. The type inference will often catch things. Functions that are declared multiple types or that have duplicate parameters, and a lot of other stuff will be caught.

Actually, it's better. If the core of your application has non trivial business logic, it's a good idea to write it in typed way and write ui and other support stuff with partially typed code.

Fair enough and I think with strict null type checking, where null/undefined isn't part of any anymore things would still get much better than with plain JS.

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