The announcement made at ng-conf Angular conference in Salt Lake City, Utah made it clear that Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) have joined hand giving a surprise to many. The two giants have collaborated with an aim to make Angular 2- the next version of Google’s JavaScript web app framework, better.
Angular, up till now, has been using its own AtScript superset of Microsoft’s TypeScript. Microsoft’s attempt at extending JavaScript with features like type annotations, generics and modules have been made through TypeScript. In the progression, these two languages will coincide. Angular 2 will be written in TypeScript but the developers will also be able to write their applications in AtScript language.
The language AtScript first came in October 2014, but seeing the current scenario it looks like the AtScript name will be retired in favour of TypeScript.
At various time in the development, Angular was written in plain JavaScript, Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL)’s own Dart language and AtScript. Features like introspection and field and metadata annotations were added to JavaScript by AtScript. Beginning with the forthcoming 1.5 release of the language which will be launching in beta, TypeScript will now include these features too.
Both the Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) team is looking forward to working together to move TypeScript and AtScript forward simultaneously in future, also working with the ECMAScript standards body on future of types in JavaScript.
Angular 2 has been widely criticized in the developer community for the reasons being it breaks compatibility with the previous versions, offering no migration path and also that it requires significant re-learning . Also adopting a Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) version may even make it harder for some to have the gut to move to the new version.
Anyways it’s a clear win for TypeScript, which has seen growing adoption over the last year since its 1.0 release also that Angular has helped TypeScript to evolve additional language features that simplifies end-to-end application development including annotations.
