"Please note: since we’re moving to a new issue tracker and a new codebase, we are not copying all issues over. If you have issues in the current CodePlex issue tracker, please try them against the new codebase and file them in the GitHub issue tracker if they still repro."
Github is back up to 117.
Managing an open source community is something that the TypeScript leadership still have yet to learn. They weren't concerned about coordinating with TC39 on module syntax (they shipped 1.0 with an arbitrary snapshot), they were never very interested in accepting code, and they don't value the time users take to document bugs and edge cases.
tl;dr the move to Github is lipstick on a pig. It is a distraction from the real changes they must make on order to collaborate well with others.
A lot are duplicates. There are two or three issues for type unions, atleast two issues for ABCs, and so on. Also a some of the issues are for VS integration.
>Github is back up to 117.
I only glanced at the GH issues but it seems they're actually internal issues discovered by the devs themselves, not from the Codeplex tracker.
Many high-profile open source projects have far more bug reports than they know what to do with. Declaring issue bankruptcy and asking people to re-test with a new version is annoying from a customer service point of view, but looked at another way, it's a scalable way for the community to help. Cut and paste (or better yet, summarize the conversation) isn't so hard if it's still a real issue.
Or ... TypeScript developers could just have added test cases to their test suite and figure out automatically whether the new implementation fixed things or caused regressions.
Sure. It's just the decision between " our bug reporters and all the time and work they spent" vs. "let's go through the issue database and migrate tickets which look useful.
I mean, really? Less than 600 bugs, and they couldn't be bothered?
Even with a small team. this could have been done in a day.
And it's not like it would be extra work, because going through the bug tracker and trying to get a broader view of the issues raised should be a thing which happens continually anyway.
all of that seems true for most repos on github. At least in my experience. I've spent the last 2 months learning node, checking out npm modules, finding bugs, seeing the projects abandoned, lots of issue filed, pull requests ignored, etc.. Maybe I've just been unlucky but this hardly seems like an MS specific thing?
Easy packaging and distribution is awesome and it's why node's ecosystem has exploded, but tools to filter that down are equally important.
A great example of this is djangopackages.com. Looking at thumbnailing packages[2] even though there are a dozen packages, only three are popular. And taking a glance at the commit sparklines only two are under active development. So I know to start with them.
I think this is partially due to the informality that many GitHub users tend to have with respect to managing their projects.
It's rare to see a GitHub-hosted project that offers proper releases, proper planning for those releases, proper documentation, and the organization and project management efforts that enable such things.
The lack of such basic project management structure leads to projects that see very erratic development, or outright abandonment. Many GitHub-hosted projects are barely more than a hobby, rather than an ongoing concern. Their code may be somewhat usable, but it's rarely comparable to what we see from more organized projects.
Proper release planning for tiny one man fifteen users project is very little planing.
Those projects do not get erratic development or get abandoned because they lack "proper planing". That is reversing cause and effect. They lack heavy planing because their development depends too much on free time of one or two people, who have other life priorities. No amount of planning will change that.
I don't see that as a bad thing. Mostly it seems to be a reflection of how low the barrier to entry is on github. It's easy to get up and running there, so naturally lots of people do, even if it's just a hobby project they work on once a year during Christmas break....
They will have no choice but to change the Typescript module system,or it will stop being compatible for Ecmascript. Right now afaik Typescript doesnt support generators either.
It's a great language but the way they handled module in Typescript was a mistake.
The only alternative they really had would be to not align with ES6/ES7 at all. The 6/7 specs are still in total flux and there are still intricate arguments/discussions on the spec list on a regular basis about the details of modules, module loaders, imports...
If people in "node land" want to keep using JavaScript they will eventually be using ES6 modules. Or they will fork the language. I would not place money on the Node team wanting to fork JavaScript.
Truth be told, CodePlex is fairly popular in the .NET world. TypeScript simply is a JavaScript project, plays well with Node, NPM and Jake - I think it makes sense for it to be on GitHub. It's not the first MSFT source base hosted on GitHub, probably won't be the last. Heck, I work at MSFT and keep all my open source code on GitHub.
I wouldn't read too much into that though - huge company, a bunch of projects and different audiences. CodePlex has an audience - there's a bunch of cool projects on there, too.
True - but remember, there's a bunch of teams building stuff. Most of Open Tech's and Azure's open code bases are on GitHub. TypeScript isn't the biggest MS project on GitHub and I just want to make sure that nobody is using this as a "CodePlex is dead!" data point.
This is part of the new face of Microsoft. They realised that they are losing their followers in the developer community by sticking to their old ways. They've been 'listening' to the public opinion a lot lately.
I just got off the phone with a recruiter who offered me a chance at a Ruby job based on my ASP.NET experience because, quote "they have a lot of old C# guys there and they're willing to train anyone willing to cross over".
This means I can make a lateral (stack) move without having to revert back to "junior" status. Hey, I love me some C# and .NET but the offers from the open-source community are just too tempting.
Isn't just about everything? Hypothesis: For any language X, there exist articles claiming either "X is too immature for real-world use" or "X is no longer a good choice for new development".
Ruby on Rails is somewhat of a special case, though.
Early web technologies like CGI, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion, ASP and ASP.NET arose due to real-world needs.
Ruby on Rails, on the other hand, arose mainly due to hype.
From a technological perspective, there really wasn't anything special about Ruby on Rails. Many of us who had been doing web development for some time had already built or used proprietary/in-house frameworks that offered the same functionality, but were written in Perl, Python or Tcl instead.
If it weren't for strong and very loud personalities within the Ruby on Rails community, combined with some very lucky timing with respect to the rise of the so-called "Web 2.0", it likely wouldn't have been seen as "special", and wouldn't have garnered the hype that it did.
Technologies that come out of an environment of hype, rather than solving real problems, tend not to stick around as long. Systems built using technologies that solve real problems continue to be used and maintained. Systems built using technology chosen purely because some manager or executive saw a webcast full of nice-sounding buzzwords tend not to survive very long.
The idea that Rails' popularity came from managers hearing buzzwords doesn't match my recollection of history. Rails' early support came from backend web developers who hated working in enterprise Java frameworks. Ruby on Rails offered them a pleasant and easy-to-jump-into alternative to that environment.
I remember Pythonistas at the time raised similar complaints about how Python already had all this stuff — but the thing is, Rails did a nice job of packaging it up in a way that was easy for disaffected Java jockeys to get into and start having fun, while the Python approach at the time was more along the lines of "take this thing and that thing — or maybe one of these five other things, we can't decide — then make this other piece yourself and stick them together with chewing gum."
Rails did come to prominence largely through social channels rather than technical superiority, but it wasn't a marketing-driven hype train targeted at nontechnical managers — it appealed to hackers who wanted to have fun but did not already have a homebrew Perl stack at the ready.
"This means I can make a lateral (stack) move without having to revert back to "junior" status. " - Good. Because developers would reset or be unemployed every 5 years otherwise.
I've made several stack switches without issue. Usually it involves switching languages at your current company, then using your current salary as leverage to get the next.
The main barrier is HR, which you can get around using this method.
Yeah, this is awesome and it's making me jealous. I'm still dreaming of a world where one day Google will announce that golang source code is moving to git and GitHub.
Slightly off topic, but can anyone share a link to a large, well designed (open-source) codebase written in TypeScript? Github incorrectly/mistakenly tags C projects at TypeScript thanks to the `.ts` files present (thanks for picking a unique TLA Microsoft ;)
Typescript has been a joy to develop in. The codebase is a mix of typescript and plain JS for some of the parsing.
There are a few interesting architectures patterns like a work around for no subclassing of Error by wrapping an error with a backwards chained decorator
That product is still in it's infancy so gradually being refactored towards full modularisation, so its still a work in progress.
FYI: I use pycharm with the node.js plugin, and typescript compiles in the background without intervention, and I can step debug the program, and the line at the top off all the files transparent changes the stack traces back into TS.
Mozilla's Shumway replacement for Flash uses TypeScript. Shumway's TypeScript translates ActionScript to JS. The Shumway team chose TypeScript for a few reasons. TypeScript's syntax is pretty close to ActionScript's, which simplifies the mapping from ActionScript to Shumway's implementation of Adobe's Flash APIs. Using three languages (AS, JS, and TS) also helps enforce modularity between the content (AS), compiler, runtime, and JITted (JS) code.
I like to think that my BrowserFS [0] codebase is a relatively well-designed TypeScript codebase, but I'm a bit biased. Not sure what you view as 'large', though.
Good news. Compiler performance is pretty horrible at scale.
I hope that they implement in-memory compilation, so that the compiler can work properly with Gulp (which would also increase build times). I also hope that they'll support automatic generation of ambient external declaration files. TypeScript doesn't work well with npm modules just yet because of that.
About TypeScript+Gulp: I was using gulp-tsc, but switched to gulp-type (https://www.npmjs.org/package/gulp-type). It offers incremental compilation and you can disable chasing through all references in the sourcefiles (since with Gulp you already provide all sources in the stream). This sped up our re-compilation times three-fold.
The really slow compiler performance was quite surprising. I switched back to coffeescript (then eventually switched to ScalaJs where they are much faster) because they were so long.
>I hope that they implement in-memory compilation, so that the compiler can work properly with Gulp
In-memory compilation already exists. I wrote a Gulp wrapper for TS for my own project [0] that supports both normal compilation and incremental compilation (i.e., watch functionality).
The real issue with TS is that it doesn't export a programmable compiler API by default, necessitating either a process.exec to the shell script or adding an export statement using the vm module. I gather that was a low priority for the devs because they wanted to get the compiler API in shape first.
Well, it seems that it requires quite a lot of code. Perhaps you should publish the gulp wrapper as a Gulp plugin.
By the way, does your Gulp wrapper load files from the disk, or are the files given to it as in-memory streams? That's what I mean by "in-memory compilation".
>does your Gulp wrapper load files from the disk, or are the files given to it as in-memory streams
The latter. The TS compiler (TypeScriptCompiler) internally works with string sources and outputs strings. The official sources use a wrapper around it (BatchCompiler) that converts input file names to input file contents and output JS+sourcemaps to files. My wrapper uses file contents from gulp.src for the same.
>Well, it seems that it requires quite a lot of code
Yes. The first part of my code is basically a reimplementation of BatchCompiler. But my code also does other things - for example I fiddle with the AST to generate automatic JSDocs, etc.
>Never heard anyone say Dart's package system is better than NPM
neither do I - just say Dart has good dedicated (npm is for JS AFAIK) package system
>Latency makes Eclipse unusable on every machine I've tried
It's not as good as lets say IntelliJ (best IDE I've ever seen) but it's "good enough"
Besides - it seems long term goal for Dart team is chromedeveditor https://github.com/dart-lang/chromedeveditor (another point for Dart it's open source) which will be pretty fast when DartVM will come to Chrome
Trying Chrome Dev Editor I'm impressed - but generally, I don't think new languages should require new editors - better plugins for existing popular ones. I use Sublime, it's configured how I like, they can add the Dart AST for autocomplete etc to provide tab completion, renames, method lookups etc. if they want to.
We're working on exactly that - it involves making the Dart analysis engine run as a standalone server that that talk to different editors and provide code-completion, errors & warning, etc.
I'm excited by this. I think that moving to Github will help the image problem Typescript has and make it a little more accessible, and it's actually a very useful + powerful technology. Compiler errors on refactors are great :)
I haven't used Typescript yet, but I'm very keen on it. How fast is the compiler currently for you? (eg. seconds or minutes?, and how big is your codebase? (eg. 10k or 100k?)
I have a Typescript project with over 200k loc and over 200 ts files. The current compiler takes a while to build the whole project, but still under 10 seconds.
However, you can also set it up to compile when you save a single ts file, which is much faster. So in practice its not any slower than what I was doing with Javascript, which was hit ctrl-S to save my changes then quickly hit refresh in Chrome to test and debug.
I haven't tried the new compiler yet, but note that a lot of the compiler's slowdown comes from parsing lib.d.ts each time it's invoked. So the time taken for compiling X lines of code doesn't scale in a linear fashion - a helloworld will probably take a long time for you to compile too, but remove the dependency on lib.d.ts and the same helloworld will compile very much faster.
Check the modules sample, there a module is passed as argument to the self executing function to which the newly created Greeter class is added, without leaking any temporary Greeter variables to the global namespace. I guess it's just designed to generate as similar code as possible for both the module and non-module cases.
The closure compiler is also pretty slow, a way around it is to keep a warm jvm and compile that way (70% performance increase over time). I assume a similar strategy is not possible for typescript, which is a pity.
Typescript seems pretty cool, lack of dead code analysis and the inability to write my own compiler passes (I have looked for this, but it does not seem to be an option - would love to stand corrected) puts me off it.
Great to see typescript evolving. It's a nice approach developing software for browsers.
Now we need tools bringing the bits (angular, breezejs, typescript etc) together.
The negative/cynical take: They're rearranging their internal deck chairs and spending time and effort on making their code pretty, rather than changing TypeScript (maligned, little-used, and little-loved) to be more relevant somehow.
I have no doubt that the slowness is a major complaint they get from TypeScript users, but at their current level of success/failure, they probably should be listening more to TypeScript non-users than users.
574 open issues exist for TypeScript on Codeplex. https://typescript.codeplex.com/workitem/list/basic
"Please note: since we’re moving to a new issue tracker and a new codebase, we are not copying all issues over. If you have issues in the current CodePlex issue tracker, please try them against the new codebase and file them in the GitHub issue tracker if they still repro."
Github is back up to 117.
Managing an open source community is something that the TypeScript leadership still have yet to learn. They weren't concerned about coordinating with TC39 on module syntax (they shipped 1.0 with an arbitrary snapshot), they were never very interested in accepting code, and they don't value the time users take to document bugs and edge cases.
tl;dr the move to Github is lipstick on a pig. It is a distraction from the real changes they must make on order to collaborate well with others.