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Volker Sorge edited this page Aug 19, 2016 · 9 revisions

Post Mortem

Some lessons learnt from the Typescript project.

General Language Observations

In general, very good experience writing Typescript. Building class hierarchies, defining interfaces, abstract classes, etc. is very convenient. In particular, all necessary typing for HTML elements etc is already built into the language. This is certainly an advantage over other approaches like closure, where these types (and in particular the associated API functions) have to be explicitly defined in extern files.

Pros

  • All necessary typing for HTML elements etc is already built into the language. This is a certainly an advantage over other approaches like closure, where these types (and in particular the associated API functions) have to be explicitly defined in extern files.
  • Generics (e.g., in the Variable class are available.
  • Types can be very fine grained (see example of JSON types), maybe sometimes too specific.

Cons for (of v1.8.10)

  • Enum structures are only definable on numbers. An example is in the definition of enum structures for events. E.g., key events can be defined via as typescript enum, whereas mouse events are defined as a sort of "pseudo-enum" structure via regular objects.
  • String subtyping can be a bit awkward (see html class and attribute types), in particular when strings are generated.
  • Some modern functionality is not yet integrated. In particular, promises are still missing. This at least should change in

Minimisation

Typescript's compiler tsc does not provide a minimisation option. I tried two minifiers:

UglifyJS

Minified code was 44KB. Code sample in samples/scripts

Closure

Minified code was 33KB, mainly because closure is better at compressing constructors and prototype assignments. Command used:

 java -jar ~/node_modules/closurecompiler/compiler/closure-compiler-v20160713.jar --js context_menu.js --create_source_map tt.map --js_output_file tt.min.js

However, it has drawbacks with respect to code maps. See next.

Code Maps

Code maps can be

Direct Code Maps

Minified Code Maps

Documentations

Code commenting follows JSDoc standards. This can be used for documentation extraction using a corresponding generator.

Typedoc

This is generated with typedoc generator.

For some reason it does not work on the actual github pages. E.g., go to the github.io version and then try to go to one of the module pages (e.g., for abstract_entry.

JSDoc

This is created with regular JSDoc generator from a typescript transpiled into ES2015 keeping comments, plus some tricks to get the "pseudo-enum" structures out, given in the tools directory. Unfortunately, JSDoc does not work out of the box on Typescript Interfaces and fails when constructors are implicit (i.e., not explicitly included in the JS class with JSDoc comments).

UML class diagrams

We have some tools to compile UML style class diagrams using graphviz/dot. Here is a script for that generates class diagrams in SVG.

Other remarks:

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