Developers at financial major Bloomberg manage over 50 million lines of JavaScript code across its various products. When the company decided it needed something more performant it looked towards an open source language from the champions of closed source proprietary software, Microsoft.
The Redmond software giant announced the TypeScript language in 2012 as a superset of JavaScript. It then not only released the language under the open source Apache License 2.0, but also continued to actively develop it along with several other contributors.
One of them was Bloomberg, which according to reports first began to look at the TypeScript language in 2016 as a means to increase the robustness and reliability of its code.
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Open all the way
Sharing insights about the move to TypeScript in a blog post, Rob Palmer, who leads the JavaScript infrastructure and tooling team at Bloomberg states that the company has over 2,000 developers working on JavaScript.
Talking to ITProToday, he shares that a majority of these developers are writing applications for the company's core platform, the Bloomberg Terminal: “...essentially all of our application layer is built using JavaScript.”
Big companies, especially those with several developers on their payroll, usually take advantage of the permissive licensing of open source projects to fork them for better control.
Bloomberg however has decided to stick to the upstream version of TypeScript, and Palmer says that’s primarily because of Microsoft’s stewardship: "It's open source in every sense of the word,"
“A clear benefit of using shared open source technology,” writes Palmer in the blog “is that when you have a problem, more often than not you find you are not alone. And when you find answers, you get the joy of sharing them.”
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Via: ITPro Today
