TypeScript 5.0, due from Microsoft as a production release on March 16, has actually been reorganized around the use of ECMAScript modules, a significant facilities modification for the strongly typed JavaScript variant.
Users of TypeScript 5.0, which currently remains in a release candidate stage, will require to run Node.js 12 at a minimum. In return, npm installs promise to carry out a little faster and use up less space, with the typescript bundle sized minimized by roughly 46%, Microsoft said in a March 9 bulletin. TypeScript too will be much faster, with construct times cut by 10% to 25%. API customers of TypeScript likely will be unaffected.TypeScript will not be shipping its API as ES modules yet. A CommonJS-authored API still will be supplied, and existing construct scripts will still work.Providing background on the shift, Microsoft said
the present TypeScript codebase precedes ECMAScript modules, which were standardized in 2015. Not understanding how suitable ES modules would be with other module systems such as CommonJS, and not seeing a huge advantage for authoring in modules at the time, TypeScript rather utilized namespaces, previously called internal modules.Although namespaces had useful features like scopes that might merge across files, making it easy to break up a job throughout files and expose it as a single variable, the majority of modern JavaScript and TypeScript code is authored utilizing modules. Hence, by using namespaces, TypeScript’s builders weren’t utilizing TypeScript the way most of their users are– and missing out on that experience. Namespaces likewise brought runtime efficiency issues.Moving to modules permits the contractors of TypeScript to close the experience space with their users, speed up the development of TypeScript, and make TypeScript much faster, Microsoft said.
However, while TypeScript is now composed with modules, the real JS files have not altered format. Libraries still act as CommonJS when executed in a CommonJS environment. Copyright © 2023 IDG Communications, Inc. Source
