TypeScript took GitHub by storm: developers are massively migrating from JavaScript

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GitHub named TypeScript the fastest growing language of 2020

GitHub platform published its annual Octoverse report, and the main surprise was TypeScript's leadership. According to the results of 2020, this programming language from Microsoft showed record growth in the developer community, outpacing even Python and Java in growth rate.

Numbers and facts

According to the report, the number of pull requests on TypeScript increased by 93% compared to 2019. For comparison: Python's growth was 22%, and JavaScript's was only 11%. In absolute numbers, TypeScript entered the top 5 languages by code volume on GitHub, trailing only JavaScript, Python, Java, and Go.

The trend is especially noticeable in web development: 67% of surveyed developers who used TypeScript in 2020 noted that they switched to it from JavaScript. The main reason cited is static typing, which reduces the number of bugs at the compilation stage by an average of 40%.

Expert opinion

Andrey Melnikov, lead developer at Yandex.Cloud, comments: "TypeScript has ceased to be just an add-on over JavaScript. In 2020, we saw how large projects — from Angular to Deno — fully switched to this language. For enterprise development, this is already a de facto standard."

Anna Volkova, team lead at EPAM, holds a similar opinion: "TypeScript solves the problem of maintaining large codebases. When a project has 500+ files, chaos begins without typing. GitHub statistics only confirm this."

Context and forecasts

The growth of TypeScript in 2020 cannot be considered in isolation from the pandemic. The massive shift to remote work forced companies to reconsider their approach to code quality. Static analysis and autocompletion in TypeScript allow newcomers to be onboarded into a project faster — this became critically important for distributed teams.

GitHub analysts predict that by 2022, TypeScript could enter the top three in popularity, overtaking Java. It is already used by giants such as Google (in Angular), Slack, and Airbnb. The trend is also relevant for the Russian market: according to HeadHunter, the number of vacancies for TypeScript developers grew by 150% over the year.

The full Octoverse 2020 report is available on the official GitHub blog.