Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnnyworker | Hacker News Reader

Make it part of the Javascript standard and see me using it the second Firefox supports it. Are there any arguments against that?

View on HN

The only real argument is an argument against waiting.

Most developers would need to wait until all browsers support it, and the vast majority of users use it, and you could easily be looking at a decade of lost opportunities while you wait for that.

That said, in a world of impending WASM, I don’t even know if TS on the browser makes sense. It seems like it won’t be long and we won’t need a JavaScript intermediary between TS and the browser at all.

I’m not a pro and don’t follow the development closely, but that said, I feel like I’ve been hearing about impending WASM for about 10 years

Nah, it’s well and truly in production now. There are new features needed to support some languages better, and closer integration with the DOM may arguably be desirable, but my understanding is that it’s at the point where heavy lifting can be done in wasm, with automatically generated JS stubs.

I might be wrong (not a front end specialist) but ISTM that a native TS implementation built today would more likely be a compiler to WASM than try to become a first class browser language.

And anyway, direct browser support for TS would take as long as WASM has taken to gain broad support.

This year is the year of WASM on the browser!

Welcome to the Python community, where type highlighting is a first class syntax feature, but actually checking it is optional (unlike the TypeScript compiler), and you get people complaining their favourite languages is polluted by ugly stuff they don’t ever use (presumably) hurting readability. You can’t please everybody.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com