JavaScript and TypeScript share a lot of things in common, but they also have differences that make each language unique. Myself and a lot of people around me are moving from using JavaScript to TypeScript. So what is TypeScript? Compare JavaScript with TypeScript, what’s the difference between them? And the most important: which one is better? Let’s follow up in this article.
What is TypeScript?
TypeScript is considered a superset of JavaScript, created to solve JavaScript problems in a more optimized way. It still follows the ECMAScript specification so its syntax is similar to JavaScript. But it is better in complex projects due to strongly typed support and compile error control.
Like JavaScript, TypeScript can be used by both client and server. In addition, JavaScript libraries are also supported for TypeScript.
Some important features of TypeScript:
- Superset of JavaScript, compatible with built-in JavaScript libraries
- Strongly typed, compiled language, following OOP principles
- Easier to debug
- Supports static typing
What is JavaScript?
JavaScript is the most popular programming language in the world today. Along with HTML, CSS, JavaScript is one of the “core” technologies of web applications.
JavaScript features dynamic typing and a JIT (just in time) interpreter. JavaScript started out as a client language (meaning JS would be executed in the browser), but it was developed to run on the server (using NodeJS).
Here are some of the outstanding features of JavaScript:
- The world’s most popular programming language
- Runs on multiple platforms, multiple paradigms, dynamic typing
- Runs on both client and server
- JIT
- Good compatibility with all browsers
Compare JavaScript with TypeScript
Define
Conceptually, these two languages have big differences. JavaScript is a scripting language that helps to create dynamic web pages and TypeScript is a superset of strongly typed JavaScript.
In other words, TypeScript is JavaScript that adds some advanced features to make programming simpler, especially those related to data types and complex code management. (However, the end result is still TypeScript that will be convert to JavaScript for execution)
Syntax and Error
Both languages follow the ECMAScript specification, so the syntax is very similar. Once you are familiar with JavaScript, switching to TypeScript is not difficult. The biggest difference of TypeScript is probably that variables need to be declared data types
TypeScript reports errors as soon as compile, thereby reducing many errors when running while JavaScript is an interpreted language, even if the code is wrong syntax, it will report an error at runtime. You can read the article TypeScript errors on LearnShareIt to learn about common errors when writing code and how to handle it.
Compile
TypeScript needs to be compiled to run. Makes programming and checking results of TypeScript more time consuming, while JavaScript can be run directly. However, TypeScript can detect some errors right at this step. This can save programmers a lot of time to find and fix bugs, and can even help prevent many potential errors right from the start.
Conclusion
To summarize, through the article “What is TypeScript? Compare JavaScript with TypeScript” you can know what TypeScript and JavaScript are, the difference between them. For a beginner I suggest you start learning from JavaScript will be easier. Once you understand JavaScript, learning TypeScript will also be faster.
To learn more about TypeScript or other programming languages you can visit LearnShareIT to find the material you want. Thanks for reading!