Compiling

One of the most-loved features of JavaScript is the lack of a compilation step. Simply change your code, refresh your browser, and the interpreter will take care of the rest. There is no need to wait for a while until the compiler is finished in order to run your code.

While this may be seen as a benefit, there are many reasons why you would want to introduce a compilation step. A compiler can find silly mistakes, such as missing braces or missing commas. It can also find other more obscure errors, such as using a single quote (') where a double quote (") should have been used. Every JavaScript developer will tell horror stories of hours spent trying to find bugs in their code, only to find that they have missed a stray closing brace } , or a simple comma ,.

Introducing a compilation step into your workflow really starts to shine when managing a large code base. There is an old adage that states that we should fail early and fail loudly, and a compiler will shout very loudly at the earliest possible stage when errors are found. This means that any check-in of source code will be free from bugs that the compiler has identified.

When making changes to a large code base, we also need to ensure that we are not breaking any existing functionality. In a large team, this often means using the branching and merging features of a source code repository. Running a compilation step before, during, and after merges from one branch to another gives us further confidence that we have not made any mistakes, or that the automatic merge process has not made any mistakes either.

If a development team is using a continuous integration process, the continuous integration (CI) server can be responsible for building and deploying an entire site, and then running a suite of unit and integration tests on the newly checked-in code. We can save hours of build time and hours of testing time by ensuring that there are no syntax errors in the code, before we embark on deploying and running tests.

Lastly, as mentioned before, the TypeScript compiler can be configured to output ES3, ES5, or ES6 JavaScript. This means that we can target different runtime versions from the same code base.