this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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[–] DrM@feddit.de 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

The main problem with JavaScript and TypeScript is that there is such a little entrybarrier to it, that way too many people use it without understanding it. The amount of times that we had major issues in production because someone doesn't understand TypeScript is not countable anymore and our project went live only 4 months ago.

For example, when you use nest.js and want to use a boolean value as a query parameter.

As an example:

@Get('valueOfMyBoolean')
@ApiQuery(
  {
    name: 'myBoolean',
    type: boolean,
  }
)
myBooleanFunction(
  @Query('myBoolean') myBoolean: boolean
){
  if(myBoolean){
    return 'myBoolean is true';
  }
  return 'myBoolean is false';
}

You see this code. You don't see anything wrong with it. The architect looks at it in code review and doesn't see anything wrong with it. But then you do a GET https://something.com/valueOfMyBoolean?myBoolean=false and you get "myBoolean is true" and if you do typeOf(myBoolean) you will see that, despite you declaring it twice, myBoolean is not a boolean but a string. But when running the unit-tests, myBoolean is a boolean.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I've never used TS, and I'm not exactly sure what nest.js even does, but building a TypeScript project on top of a JavaScript library not designed for it seems like asking for trouble. Is that standard practice?

[–] sloppy_diffuser@sh.itjust.works 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Yes. As of this writing there are 7,738 type definitions in a central repo maintained by users for plain JavaScript packages.

https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped

Many package owners write type definitions included with their package that is written in JavaScript also.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Web dev continues to be cursed, I guess.

If I really needed to use a JS library in TS, I'd have to build some sort of adapter between the two that crashes whenever the JS library (that doesn't know anything about your types) breaks the typing rules. Anything else will inevitably lead to the above "fun" kind of bugs.

[–] DrM@feddit.de 0 points 10 months ago

I don't think that this would work, there are no types anymore during runtime because everything is translated into plain js on build. TypeScript only exists during development