TypeScript 2.0 Adds Null, Undefined And Never
Friday, 23 September 2016

TypeScript 2.0 has been released with support for new data types including Null and Undefined. 

TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript. It was developed by Microsoft for creating complex applications, and is a built-in programming language for Visual Studio. 

TypeScript 2.0 adds several new features  to help developers work more effectively, is more aligned with ECMAScript’s evolution, and has better support for JavaScript libraries and tools.

One change to the new version is support for two special types, Null and Undefined, that (strangely enough) have the values null and undefined respectively. Until now you couldn't explicitly name these types, as the type checker considered null and undefined assignable to anything. Because null and undefined were essentially valid values of every type, you couldn't specifically exclude them or detect erroneous use of them.

A new strict null checking mode, removes the null and undefined values from the domain of every type, and only allows them to be assigned to themselves and any. 

The support for types has also been increased with the implementation of a control flow-based type analysis for local variables and parameters. In earlier versions type analysis was limited to If statements. In the new version the type checker analyses all possible flows of control in statements and expressions to produce the most specific type possible (the narrowed type) at any given location for a local variable or parameter that is declared to have a union type.

A new primitive type has also been added in this version, the never type. As the release notes say:

"This represents the type of values that never occur. Specifically, never is the return type for functions that never return and never is the type of variables under type guards that are never true."

Because never is a subtype of every type, it is always omitted from union types and it is ignored in function return type inference as long as there are other types being returned.

On a more positive note, Glob support has been added to tsconfig.json. This has been one of the most requested features, according to the developers, partially because of the number of third party tools have now support tsconfig.json, most of which support some sort of extension to tsconfig.json that supports file globs.The addition within TypeScript itself regularises the situation.

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More Information

TypeScript Blog

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Last Updated ( Friday, 23 September 2016 )