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Comment by vosper | Hacker News Reader

What's the end state for TypeScript? Does it one day become feature complete and slow down? One of the frustrating things about trying to find help with TS today as a beginner is the plethora of SO and blog posts talking about much older versions. If you're lucky there'll be some comment "As of 2.6 you can now do ...", but even 2.6 is a lot of versions back - how do I know that's still the best way to do it in 3.7?

I'm for progress, but it makes me a little wary to start my team of no-previous-TS-experience JS devs on a TypeScript project when there's still a new version every few months. Keeping up with Webpack is enough of a hassle...

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JavaScript itself keeps changing, so we need to keep pace with that, for one. Beyond that, we relentlessly seek to improve how people interact with our editor tools, and make additions to the (type) language and compiler to support that. .d.ts files from js files, for example, are highly motivated by a desire to better support incremental compilations with .js inputs, as .d.ts files are used as incremental metadata. Assertion signatures were added to better express the cross-call control flow patterns some (assertion) libraries already use, to make using them in a well-typed way more ergonomic.

Generally speaking, it's not often we add something that _invalidates_ the old way to do something (in the language) - our additions are usually made to make new patterns possible to express.

Thanks for the response. I do appreciate the efforts of the team, and am planning to continue learning TypeScript :)

Maybe this exists, but one thing that would be super helpful is a document that explains any places where there's a "new best way" of doing things, and also details what the old way was.

Here's an example from yesterday: I was Googling about extending a type (I think) and the first SO result (top of Google) says "you can't do that in TypeScript"... but reading the comments someone had said "actually you can, in 2.6 or later". That's the kind of thing that it would be great to have summarised in one place. Not necessarily all the changes (ie, not just all the release notes) but specifically where the language has changed and an old way of doing things, or a previous restriction, is gone. Preferably with examples. (I'd try to create this, but I don't have the skills to do so).

We actually primarily use StackOverflow for this (as it's the first resource many devs go to, as you did, and it's collaborative). We even pre-seed questions and answers for releases, sometimes.

If you find an answer on SO is out of date - suggest a new answer (or ask for one) and get it updated (there's far, far too many for us to keep explicit track of them, there's only a handful of us on the team)! :D

> how do I know that's still the best way to do it in 3.7?

Maybe don't worry about the "best" way to do something and use what works? Typescript has really good backward compatibility, it's very rare for something to stop working that previously worked. If it turns out there is an easier way to do something, you'll likely have reason to want to learn it, but at least in my experience with Typescript you'll rarely find a "need" to learn it or your code will break.

How do you handle other language - including JavaScript - updates for your team?

Javascript doesn't change at anything like the pace that TypeScript does, so it hasn't been much of a hassle.

But even so we (like many teams with large codebases, I suspect) have callbacks, promises, and async/await all mixed together, depending on when the code was (re)written. It's on our list.

Javascript formally releases once a year, but individual feature adoption in browsers is totally separate from that, and happens.... whenever they feel like it. v8 (chrome's js engine) doesn't have a set release schedule, but has already had 6 formal minor releases this year, each partially adopting some new JS runtime features, all of which have already shipped to chrome.

At our current pace, we formally release 4 times a year, for reference, which is actually a far cry from the more continuous deployment browser vendors currently have setup.

The main difference is that most people kinda ignore new JavaScript stuff for awhile until it trends or gains sufficient rollout. It's an interesting world - I can't really say that people are actually JavaScript version aware, beyond, maybe, what compatibility presets @babel/preset-env gives them.

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