Microsoft’s priorities for TypeScript for the first six months of 2019 are to enhance the core type system, boost productivity, and improve linting.

Microsoft’s TypeScript roadmap is not a commitment to feature delivery, the company noted.

For TypeScript and the core system, the goal is to statically model patterns in JavaScript in a reasonable way while enforcing correctness and snagging bugs. The features being added to the ECMAScript specification underlying JavaScript mean TypeScript has to evolve with it. Priorities for TypeScript and the core system include:

With the user base now including the JavaScript ecosystem as a whole, TypeScript is no longer just for TypeScript. With this in mind, Microsoft’s priorities include:

For productivity space, goals include:

Also under consideration are enhancements for linting, with plans calling for using the ESLint pluggable JavaScript linting utility over the TSLint static analysis tool for TypeScript code. Microsoft plans to contribute to ESLint’s TypeScript support to bring it to parity with TSLint. TypeScript’s repository will switch to ESLint.

For speed, stability, and scalability, priorities include:

For the command-line experiences, surfacing language service operations on the command line is under consideration.  Users have asked for ways to trigger operations like “organize imports” and to automatically apply code transformations used by quick fixes and refactorings.

The error user experience in TypeScript provides a way for developers to comprehend what the type system is doing. But the UX has not kept up with advances to the system. Plans call for prioritizing misleading error messages that users file and rethinking “scarier” messages. Also, error messages could be more approachable in editors, with users seeing a full explanation of an error on demand.

This story, "TypeScript roadmap: Microsoft’s plans for 2019" was originally published by InfoWorld.