Microsoft pushes optional type annotations for JavaScript

Microsoft is backing a proposal to bring optional and erasable type syntax to JavaScript, potentially making the company’s TypeScript language, which builds on JavaScript, faster and easier to use.

The standards proposal calls for allowing type annotations to be added to JavaScript code that would be checked by type checkers external to JavaScript. At runtime, a JavaScript engine would treat the types as comments. The plan calls for JavaScript to carve out of a set of syntax for types that engines would ignore but tools such as TypeScript, Flow, and others could use. This proposal would add optional annotations to ECMAScript, the official standard underlying JavaScript.

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