Man, if only they'd debuted with this, but, hindsight and all. My only thing is that TypeScript has no spec, standard, or competing implementations so it seems a bit risky to treat it as a first-class citizen as far as publishing packages goes.
The TypeScript syntax is very stable - there is no spec, but it's very stable. The type system on the other hand: not very stable, and yeah I agree - that would be risky to rely on.
However as JSR only relies on the syntax, not on the type system, it's no problem :)
Technically ES did introduce types already: in the "lost version" ES4. Typescript's syntax was partially inspired from ES4 and while not "compatible" with the previous type system there is more compatibility in the syntax than you might expect.
The Type Annotations [0] proposal that TC-39 (in charge of ES standardization) has kept in front of them (at Stage 1 so far) takes the "Python approach" of standardizing the syntax but not the type system still leaving that to external tools (in part because of the lessons from the mistakes of ES4 and the type system that was standardized but never really adopted). The proposal basically assumes that most types will (still) be in the Typescript type system (and would still need Typescript or compatible tool to type check) and maximal (but not complete) compatibility with Typescript syntax is a goal of the proposal.
But you don't don't have to take my word on that, the FAQ at the bottom of that Type Annotations proposal is well written and quite detailed.
I used ActionScript 3 back in the noughties and was so excited for ES4 in the browser. Adobe open-sourcing Tamarin made it seem it was a done deal (I didn't follow the politics). I was so disappointed when it was killed. It did mean that when I tried Angular 2 the best part of a decade later I was delighted with how familiar TypeScript felt.
I've been complaining about the death of ES4 since it was killed back in 07 or 08.
The proposal might have compat types with TS but what about all the other TS features like generics. Now more than ever, it seems risky to bet the house on TS.
TC-39 isn't "betting the house on TS": the proposal is generic and intentionally doesn't define types it defines syntax for annotations of types. It's basically "type information may appear between a colon after an identifier and an equals sign or other terminator" and "type is a statement keyword with type information following it' and "interface is a block keyword with type information inside that block". That's pretty much the entirety of the proposal: it doesn't state what that type information is (just parsing limits on what it could not be so that it doesn't blow up language parsing), what it is used for (other than that the general idea at runtime is that type annotations are comments just like existing jsdoc comments), or who uses it. While the proposal is trying to stay syntax compatible (again, not types compatible because the proposal doesn't include types) with Typescript it also points out existing overlaps with Closure and Flow type syntaxes and is built so that both of those can use the new syntax for their own, different type systems.
This is why it is a Python-inspired proposal: Python didn't define types, Python defined "here's some places in the language that are effectively ignored like comments that type systems are expected to use". Python has made them more than "just" comments in later proposals and TC-39 holds the right to do that for ES/JS in the future but the current proposal stops about where Python's first proposal did at "types are just fancy inline comments for compilers like (but not limited to) Typescript/Closure/Flow".
Again the proposal itself is a really good read for specifics of where it looks like Typescript and what parts of Typescript are intentionally not supported. For instance as a good reminder there are only three (!) features of Typescript left that aren't ES-standardized and generate code: enums, namespaces, and class parameter properties. Of those, both enums and namespaces have been marked deprecated for a long time and many lint rules exist to help eliminate them from your code if you are still using them.
I'm not betting anything on TypeScript. It was released 11 years ago, and it's incredibly valuable to me. If it takes another 5 years for ES to implement first-class types, and it's a good implementation, I'll start using ES for new work at that time. What's lost here? TS won't just stop compiling.
Still, native typing is not even on the horizon for ES, so I think my point stands for businesses that are heavily invested in supporting TS. TS is what we need today, it doesn't make sense to ignore it because theoretically it could be obsolete in 5-10 years.
If and when it does, why do you think it wouldn't just be a subset of TS? Why reinvent the wheel when you have a perfectly good one that's beed around for 12 years and is proven in production?
Consumers don't touch any ts, outside the (technically optional) .d.ts
Thecwayvi understand it in theory, the typescript version a library uses could disappear forever the day after a library had been published to JSR and all would be fine.
Until someone wants to maintain the code of course, but then you'd have the exact same problem with the elusive typescript version if the repository only took compile output.
What JSR would break (or make a deliberately difficult path?) is using some private fork of typescript that isn't even available on the day of publication.
The benefit of JSR, as far as I understand it, is offering an easy path to publication that makes type parts not an extra that some might skip but a reliable default. It does make me wonder however, how long-term reliable the finding will be: JSR promises more service than registries before, while also being more tool agnostic. I'm not sure if it's true, but my impression was that in many cases, the registry was primarily bankrolled by however the tooling was funded, e.g. effectively becoming a marketing expense to selling tooling expertise. JSR appears particularly removed from any of that and it's bad enough when the repository fades away in terms of static hosting, it's worse if it also leaves your library without a build process.
