I'm a front end developer working with JavaScript since 1996. I enjoy writing small, efficient libraries to other developers accomplish complicated tasks with less code.
Actually, when you're using VSCode, you can turn on TypeScript type checking for JavaScript with "implicitProjectConfig.checkJs": true". This tells the TypeScript language service to check the types for the JavaScript. When you add JSDoc comments, TypeScript uses those to understand the document's types. This means you get real time type checking in VSCode for plain ole JavaScript. This also includes features like symbol renaming across files, auto completion, go to definition, peek definition, go to type definition, find all references, etc. You can setup VSCode in settings for no explicit any for stricter type checking. If you try to change a type, VSCode will flag this error across all the files in your project where that type is used.
JSDoc lets you define custom types. You can import types from external files for reuse across your project. You can even do type casting. All of this while writing JavaScript. JSDocs with VSCode gives you type safety and intellisense for plain JavaScript. This means you're not limited to the JavaScript feature set that TypeScript supports. You can use whatever features currently supported by Babel, etc. If you've got a problematic line where type casting isn't working or you're using an expando property and don't want to escape it with [""], you can tell TypeScript to ignore it with:
// @ts-ignore
JSDoc comments are more verbose than the type declarations in TypeScript, but I personally prefer them because I know right where to look for a block of code's type information. The second benefit of JSDoc is that the comments can also be used to create HTML documentation for the code. In fact, the TypeScript team uses JSDoc comments in the TypeScript source code. JSDoc is the recommended way of providing documentation for TypeScript.
Actually, when you're using VSCode, you can turn on TypeScript type checking for JavaScript with "implicitProjectConfig.checkJs": true". This tells the TypeScript language service to check the types for the JavaScript. When you add JSDoc comments, TypeScript uses those to understand the document's types. This means you get real time type checking in VSCode for plain ole JavaScript. This also includes features like symbol renaming across files, auto completion, go to definition, peek definition, go to type definition, find all references, etc. You can setup VSCode in settings for no explicit any for stricter type checking. If you try to change a type, VSCode will flag this error across all the files in your project where that type is used.
JSDoc lets you define custom types. You can import types from external files for reuse across your project. You can even do type casting. All of this while writing JavaScript. JSDocs with VSCode gives you type safety and intellisense for plain JavaScript. This means you're not limited to the JavaScript feature set that TypeScript supports. You can use whatever features currently supported by Babel, etc. If you've got a problematic line where type casting isn't working or you're using an expando property and don't want to escape it with [""], you can tell TypeScript to ignore it with:
// @ts-ignoreJSDoc comments are more verbose than the type declarations in TypeScript, but I personally prefer them because I know right where to look for a block of code's type information. The second benefit of JSDoc is that the comments can also be used to create HTML documentation for the code. In fact, the TypeScript team uses JSDoc comments in the TypeScript source code. JSDoc is the recommended way of providing documentation for TypeScript.
may not be 100% true anymore: github.com/Microsoft/tsdoc