At the time, it was clear to us that JavaScript’s usage was growing, but with that, so were many of the pain points as codebases would grow. Things like renaming properties, avoiding typos, and navigating codebases were not simple. Fast forward to today, and JavaScript has become even more ubiquitous. While ECMAScript has advanced significantly, it still suffers from many of the same problems of managing complex codebases. Our answer was TypeScript: a superset of JavaScript that simply adds optional static types and provides powerful tooling.
Today we’re proud of how far the project has come. Both the language and community have seen remarkable growth. This past month alone, TypeScript has seen over 7.5 million downloads on npm. Definitely Typed has reached over 4,600 contributors for over 3,600 packages. Keep in mind those numbers don’t even account for npm packages that are written in TypeScript, or which provide their own declaration files!
And with new feature-rich releases every two months, it’s no wonder TypeScript was voted the 3rd most loved programming language in StackOverflow’s 2017 survey while its question views grew by 142% over the past year.
We’ve certainly had the privilege of working with such an enthusiastic community of TypeScript and JavaScript users who’ve grown with us each step of the way. So thank you for being a part of the TypeScript mission. We hope to continue to serve you the best we can.