TypeScript

Rationale

TypeScript  is Fluid Attacks’ main front-end programming language.

The main reasons why we chose it over other alternatives are:

• It is open source .
• It is a high-level programming language that is fairly easy to understand when compared to others.
• It has a big community that supports thousands of libraries, making it very flexible.
• It has a big market, allowing us to easily find developers who have worked with it previously.
• It has static typing  support, which helps with maintainability, clarity and debugging.
• It is a compiled language , meaning that it requires spending extra time on compilation, but also increases source code quality by validating many things that interpreted languages do not.
• It is the most popular programming language to use along with Node.js .

Alternatives

The following languages were considered but not chosen for the following reasons:

CoffeeScript

• It has a much smaller community, making it less flexible.
• It has a small market, so finding experienced developers is way harder.
• It has been shadowed by TypeScript in recent years.
• It uses its own syntax, increasing cognitive burden on developers.

ClojureScript

• It has a much smaller community, making it less flexible.
• It has a small market, so finding experienced developers is way harder.
• It has been shadowed by TypeScript in recent years.
• It uses its own syntax, increasing cognitive burden on developers.

Usage

TypeScript is used by:

• Development documentation
• Gitlab Bot
• Platform Frontend
• Jira integration
• VSCode extension