I am really puzzling what is Microsoft trying to accomplish here? Eventually a C# that compiles to JavaScript? TypeScript is a great language, and surprisingly (or not) it's more successful than Dart. Now, of course, I want TypeScript to compile to CLR as well. :)
I think people read into TypeScript too much. It's just a "right-now minimal-hassle" way to make front-end dev's lives easier, nothing more.
Maybe Microsoft disagrees, but I see TypeScript as something intended to make itself obsolete: eventually, when all browsers are running ES9 (or whichever version we decid has fixed "all" of JavaScript's problems) or WebAssembly (and we're all writing front-end code in C#/C++/Ruby/whatever), then TypeScript will just fade away, by design. For now, it's kinda like JQuery in motivation if not literally architecture: it shields you from browser inconsistencies (in this case, where you don't know what ES version the target is running) and helps you avoid JavaScript's headaches. Just as JQuery became less necessary as time went on-- not because it got worse but because browsers got better-- so too will TypeScript.
by the time all the browsers will run ES(x) ES(y) will be out and everyone will be transpiling ES(y) to ES(x). Given the developer base it's very unlikely to go away.
TypeScript is older. It was first released in 2012, whereas Dart was released in 2013.
Dart arrived with much fanfare though, whereas TypeScript was more low-key, and it's taken a while to become mainstream. Google's announcement that Angular 2 would use it has brought it a lot more attention from outside of the traditional MS/.NET dev crowd.
Microsoft have also been shifting the project's focus towards a more Babel-esque one, emphasising greater interoperability with existing (untyped) JS libraries, and support for new ES6/2015 features (and beyond).
Don't know what you're referring to. Dart's release was well past by the time TypeScript debuted.[1] Dart was announced in 2011.[2][3] The only significance that 2013 has to Dart that I know of is that's when Dart 1.0 was released. If that's what we're measuring, TypeScript's 1.0 coincided with Build 2014—still later than Dart's corresponding date, and among other things, that would mean we could say Rust is less than a year old, even though it predates both.
I think Dart and TS will have more or less same audience - and both have their advantages. For me TS is just worse than Dart - not as elegant IMO (all in all - JS superset) and Dart has own VM on server, own consistent packaging system and good non-windows IDE support (Webstorm, IntelliJ).
That actually existed internally at MS, along with many other projects to improve developing large JS codebases, most of which have fallen by the wayside. There was even a Flow-like compiler that worked with type annotations in comments. TypeScript has won out, although there is a LOT of code written in these other projects.
