TypeScript 5.2 is now available in a beta release. The next planned update of Microsoft’s strongly typed JavaScript, TypeScript 5.2 supports the explicit resource management feature planned for JavaScript’s ECMAScript standard.
TypeScript 5.2 reached a beta phase on June 30, according to a Microsoft bulletin. Explicit resource management is intended to address a common pattern in software development regarding the lifetime and management of resources such as I/O and memory. The key idea is to support resource disposal, or clean-up work, as a first-class idea in JavaScript. This begins with adding a new built-in symbol called Symbol.dispose. For convenience, TypeScript defines a new global type called Disposable.
A production release of TypeScript 5.2 is due August 22, following a release candidate planned for August 8. The TypeScript 5.2 beta can be accessed through NuGet or via NPM:
npm install -D typescript@beta
Other new capabilities in TypeScript 5.2:
- Decorator metadata, also an upcoming ECMAScript feature, is intended to make it easy for decorators to create and consume metadata on any class they are used on or within.
- An all-or-nothing restriction on the use of tuple labels has been lifted. The language now can preserve labels when spreading into an unlabeled tuple.
- Object member completions are provided when a comma is missing. Previously, if a comma were forgotten and auto-completion requested, TypeScript would confusingly give unrelated completion results.
- Easier method usage for unions of arrays means that methods like
filter,find,some,every, andreducecan be invoked on unions of arrays in cases where they previously did not work. - A refactoring has been added to inline the contents of a variable to all usage sites. Using the “inline variable” refactoring will eliminate the variable and replace all the variable’s usages with its initializer.
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