Exploring the Benefits of Using Typescript over Regular JavaScript
Tags: javascript, typescript, node
Published: 2023-01-04 22:05:44

As the web development industry continues to evolve, more and more developers are turning to Typescript as an alternative to regular JavaScript. Typescript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript. It adds optional static typing, classes, and modules to JavaScript, which makes it easier to write, maintain, and debug large-scale applications. Typescript was released by Microsoft in October of 2012, Microsoft created Typescript to fix some of the problems that came with large scale application development using Javascript due to some of the vulnerability that is inherent in Javascript, Typescript today has been the standard tool for application development with Javascript.  So why do we all love using Typescript?

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Personally since I stumbled on Typescript, I fell in love with immediately and I've never looked back at Javascript, Anywhere I can use Javascript I try my best to replace it with Typescript instead. Typescript is a Javascript developer's best friend. Whether you're building with NodeJs on the backend, or you want type safety with JSX when coding with React, you get the awesome support of Typescript. Personally I enjoy using Typescript because it helps me  catch simple bugs in development, we like the security and structure that comes from using a strongly typed language,  we are going to explore some benefits of using Typescript instead if Javascript. Let's dive in, in no particular order.

Typescript has one of the most advance type checker system any programming language can have. This system is strongly typed however it eliminates the need for verbose code by making use of type inference, the type checker allows for union types and the use of type Generic, it can also handle conditional code especially when the value is of a union type providing intellisence based on the result of the type predicate. This leads to the strong type guards that we use in Typescript , arguably the type checker system is one of the main advantage of using Typescript over Javascript because Javascript has no type checker system in place, type checking in Javascript is loosely typed and only determined at run time.

Another big benefit of using Typescript is that it allows developers to detect errors early in the development process. One of the biggest challenges of developing with JavaScript is that errors are often only discovered during runtime. This can lead to costly delays and expensive debugging. Typescript helps to eliminate these issues by allowing developers to catch errors at compile time. This can save a lot of time and effort in the long run. How many times do you find your self passing the wrong type of argument to a function? Or passing less arguments than needed for that function? How about making use of a variable that doesn't exist? All these which I just discussed are totally legal in Javascript and are the source of some nerve racking bug you will deal with. You don't get this with Typescript.

Another benefit of Typescript is that it supports object-oriented programming. This feature makes it easier for developers to create and maintain large-scale applications. It also makes it easier to write maintainable code, which can be a big time-saver for teams. If you like going heavy on using an Object Oriented approach to your codebase then Typescript is certainly a better way to go about as opposed to using plain Javascript. Typescript has excellent support for classes, interface and objects. This also extends to the functions that we declare in our code, OOP with Typescript can be compared to other strongly typed languages out there, and it even holds its own very well against them, I have written on OOP with Typescript in some of my articles and you should give it a look if like that kind of stuff.

VS code is our standard go to editor today and it was built with Typescript, this implies that we get unmatched IDE support when developing applications with Typescript especially on VS code. It is this support that allows you to spot those simple bugs that could break your code in production, debugging Typescript code is also a lot easier to the IDE support, source of bugs can be easily identified and dealt with. This also makes refactoring our code much easier, I often use Type extraction when refactoring my code base, essentially creating and using a type with just a few buttons, especially when it comes to function parameters and return payload.

Finally, Typescript is more scalable than regular JavaScript. It supports the latest ECMAScript features, meaning developers can use the latest JavaScript features even if their target browsers don’t support it, this is because Typescript being a superset of Javascript can be compiled to a version of Javascript that is compatible with most browsers, as the developer you are not concerned with how this works, you just write your code then use the Typescript compiler to determine the version of Javascript you want to compile to.

To read more articles like this, visit [Netcreed](https://blog.thenetcreed.com)

So if you aren't already using Typescript then after this you should really consider using it today so you could 10x your skills and portfolio as a developer.