Programming TypeScript

Chapter 11. Interoperating with JavaScript

We don’t live in a perfect world. Your coffee can be too hot and burn your mouth a little when you drink it, your parents might call and leave you voicemails a little too often, that pothole by your driveway is still there no matter how many times you call the city, and your code might not be completely covered with static types.

Most of us are in this boat: though once in a while you’ll have the leeway to start a greenfield project in TypeScript, most of the time it will start as a little island of safety, embedded in a larger, less safe codebase. Maybe you have a well-isolated component that you want to try TypeScript on even though your company uses regular ES6 JavaScript everywhere else, or maybe you’re fed up with getting paged at 6 A.M. because you refactored some code and forgot to update a call site (it’s now 7 A.M., and you’re ninja-merging TSC into your codebase before your coworkers wake up). Either way, you will probably start with an island of TypeScript in a type-less sea.

So far in this book I’ve been teaching you to write TypeScript the right way. This chapter is about writing TypeScript the practical way, in real codebases that are in the process of migrating away from untyped languages, that use third-party JavaScript libraries, that at times sacrifice type safety for a quick hot patch to unbreak prod. This chapter is dedicated to working with JavaScript. We’ll explore:

• Using type declarations

• Gradually migrating ...