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Usage of TypeScript, Microsoft’s strongly typed language based on JavaScript, has soared compared to six years ago, according to the 2021 State of JS survey released February 15.
Asked about their use of “JavaScript flavours,” 69 per cent of survey respondents now use TypeScript, compared to just 21 per cent six years ago.
JavaScript flavours were defined as languages that compile to JavaScript. Other JavaScript flavours trailed TypeScript by a large margin; the next was Elm at 2.4 per cent, followed by Flow at 1.7 per cent and CoffeeScript at 1.5 per cent.
TypeScript was released as open source in 2012. The current version is TypeScript 4.5.5, with TypeScript 4.6 now in a release candidate phase. The survey was conducted from January 13 to February 2022 and gathered 16,085 responses, to gather data on trends in web development to help developers make technological choices.
Among other findings, JavaScript was described as being in a tremendously better state today than in 2016 while WebAssembly, a binary format intended to improve web application performance, has been used by 15.6 per cent of respondents, compared to 10.5 per cent last year and 7.2 per cent in 2019.
In addition, Progressive Web Apps, which are web apps that use service workers and other capabilities in an effort to offer an experience on par with native apps, were used by 62.2 per cent of respondents, an increase from 55.9 per cent last year and 48.3 per cent the year before.
Delving deeper, Node.js was the most commonly used JavaScript runtime at 71.5 per cent while Python tops among other languages used by participants at 24.8 per cent -- followed by PHP at 19 per cent and Java at 18.1 per cent.
Furthermore, the number of respondents who thought JavaScript was moving too fast was at 38 per cent, down from 59 per cent six years ago. Also, React and Vue have been the dominant JavaScript frameworks for six years running.
