Chapter 8. Migrating to TypeScript
You’ve heard that TypeScript is great. You also know from painful experience that maintaining your 15-year-old, 100,000-line JavaScript library isn’t. If only it could become a TypeScript library!
This chapter offers some advice about migrating your JavaScript project to TypeScript without losing your sanity and abandoning the effort.
Only the smallest codebases can be migrated in one fell swoop. The key for larger projects is to migrate gradually. Item 60 discusses how to do this. For a long migration, it’s essential to track your progress and make sure you don’t backslide. This creates a sense of momentum and inevitability to the change. Item 61 discusses ways to do this.
Migrating a large project to TypeScript won’t necessarily be easy, but it does offer a huge potential upside. A 2017 study found that 15% of bugs fixed in JavaScript projects on GitHub could have been prevented with TypeScript.1 Even more impressive, a survey of six months’ worth of postmortems at AirBnb found that 38% of them could have been prevented by TypeScript.2 If you’re advocating for TypeScript at your organization, stats like these will help! So will running some experiments and finding early adopters. Item 59 discusses how to experiment with TypeScript before you begin migration.
Since this chapter is largely about JavaScript, many of the code samples are either pure JavaScript (and not expected to pass the type checker) or checked with looser settings (e.g., with ...
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