Microsoft’s superset of JavaScript, TypeScript, has become the fourth most popular programming language on the code collaboration platform, GitHub.

The rise of TypeScript is tracked in the recently released State of the Octovere 2020 report by Microsoft-owned GitHub. Prior to 2016, TypeScript was not in the top 10 for languages ​​in GitHub’s ranking, but it climbed to seventh position in 2018 and over the past year it has climbed to fourth, eclipsing C #, PHP and C ++. The first three languages ​​are JavaScript, followed by Python and Java.

TypeScript is Microsoft’s effort to improve JavaScript by introducing a static type system that compiles to JavaScript.

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This type system – which assigns type declarations and annotations to the data that makes up a program – gives developers a more efficient version of JavaScript that compiles to JavaScript without type annotations, so the code runs in browsers as pure JavaScript.

Microsoft released TypeScript in 2012 after two years of internal development. The scripting language will be 10 years later in December.

TypeScript co-creator Anders Hejlsberg, a technical member of Microsoft and “father of C #,” recently told ZDNet that he had to sell the idea of ​​an open source language to the most senior Microsoft officials in 2010, when the company under then-CEO Steve Ballmer was still pissed off about open source.

James Governor, co-founder of developer analyst firm RedMonk, believes the growing popularity of TypeScript in recent years is due to the fact that it meets the needs of JavaScript developers for “type security”. Its rise on GitHub suggests that TypeScript is a language that isn’t going away anytime soon.

In mid-2019, TypeScript overtook PHP, which was the third most popular language on GitHub in 2016, but is now the sixth most commonly used in projects hosted on GitHub.

TypeScript has become popular with web developers with large JavaScript code bases including Slack, Airbnb, and Bloomberg. Microsoft also wrote its popular open-source cross-platform code editor Visual Studio Code in TypeScript.

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The Google developers behind Angular are TypeScript fans. The language has also been boosted by the demise of Adobe Flash, which will reach end of life this month and no longer be supported by any major browsers next year.

TypeScript emerged from Microsoft after Internet Explorer and Edge browsers already lost the browser war against Google Chrome, which had the powerful JavaScript engine V8.

At the same time, HTML5 was happening and developers were building larger JavaScript applications where development tools like automated code completion could help. The key to TypeScript’s success is support for popular code editors, including JetBrain’s WebStorm, Emacs, and VS Code.

TypeScript has also become essential for Deno, a potential successor to node.js, the ubiquitous runtime for running JavaScript outside of a browser. Deno uses Google’s V8 engine and is written in Rust created by Mozilla.

Learn more about TypeScript and Microsoft’s programming languages