We've been using Typescript (almost) since the day it was released. IMHO, I would never start any decent-sized JS project without it.
The development speed is really good. It of course takes some time to transpile, but we have a live-reloading setup which allows us to see code changes almost instantly. The actual build time will depend on your setup (our projects are usually between 1-5s), but I think the advantages of a type system easily outweigh any build time.
I don't have too much experience with the different test frameworks, but we've used mocha (with chai), and they both work great.
The only real downside is that non-TS libraries will need a definition file to enable typechecking. We don't use too many 3rd party libraries, but most of the popular ones include typescript definitions, and making your own for libraries which don't have them isn't too hard, depending on the size of the library, of course.
In summary, we've not seen any downsides to using TS. The language is a joy to write in, and the type system is so well designed that you can actually avoid writing code in some places by designing your types properly.
That's very odd. I'm quite new to VS Code, so this could be confusion on my part. I am running on the latest TS (typescript@beta and typescript@next before that), so perhaps that's why I see the version number.
- You can see which version of typescript is being used in VS Code in the bottom-right corner while a typescript file is open.
- It does take a lot of time to get a TS environment setup, but I have to agree with the previous commenter, the benefits are completely worth it. This is just my opinion of course, but it's allowed me to finally treat JS as a development option.
Excellent advice about breaking things into smaller parts. You'd be surprised what can be accomplished by breaking things down, and combining them together once each individual piece works. That's when you really get the feeling of something starting to almost design itself.