Ask HN: TS separate from JS would be awesome; why's no one working on it?

4 points

6 years ago

For example, TypeScript has this is significant limitation [1]. It's been open for close to six years. I suspect the difficulty of implementing it is in part due to having to maintain the proper relationship of TypeScript to JavaScript.

It would seem that a version, or fork, of TypeScript that is NOT a superset of JavaScript (but can compile to JavaScript, and probably web-assembly) would be a much cleaner. powerfully expressive language.

I bet that would be a _very_ popular language. We could have higher-kinded types; the module/import system could be cleaned up a lot; we could have a proper standard library, decimal and integer types, be able to use JSX natively, and so on. It would probably also be less complex to implement than TS as it exists now. So why isn't Microsoft and any other group working on this?

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/1213

Edit: title shortened

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