TSLite

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I've been thinking a bit about TypeScript as of late, primarily motivated by TypeScript's Isolated Declarations feature. Mainly I've been thinking about what a new and fresh variant of typed JavaScript could look likefn-1Show footnote^{[1]Jump to footnote}.

I've mostly narrowed it down to the following feature set that I'm tentatively calling TSLite (kinda like SQLite to SQL), to note though - this is only just a concept at this point in time, I haven't built anything formal for this idea but I might consider leveraging AI to help me build some kind of type checking tool possibly!

Features (or lack of features):

• Static types are enforced for variables and functions
  • Essentially no support for type inference
• Removing some TypeScript specific features like namespace's, enum's, and other TS flavored features (like TypeScript decorators)
  • It should strictly be a static superset on JavaScript, with no changes to how the code will work at runtime
• No any type, instead prefer unknown

I think with these constraints you could design a fairly minimal type checking system that could be as efficient (maybe more efficient) than TypeScript is today.