Gremlin Native Typescript Support/Update is over due

[Stephen Akaeze]

The gremlin typescript package has not being updated in over a year. This explains why the JavaScript client variant and its type definition are fast dropping in weekly downloads in spite of new cool feature releases. Typescript ensures we can build safely at scale.

When will then client natively support Typescript without replying on community-maintained @types package? Or when will the types package be updated for all new features released in the past year? 

[Ken Hu]

A lot of work has recently been done by a community contributor, Tien, to support TypeScript natively in master (https://github.com/apache/tinkerpop/tree/master/gremlin-javascript/src/main/javascript/gremlin-javascript). These TypeScript changes should be included in the next major release (4.0). There is currently no agreed timeline on the release but it will most likely be available sometime next year.

[Stephen Akaeze]

Hey Ken,

I appreciate the efforts on closing the gap on this in version 4.0. 

Graph vendors like AWS also require additional time before supporting version changes thus also delaying production-level adoption. Is there any other internal effort in updating the existing @types/gremlin definition package?

[Ken Hu]

The recent discussion in the TinkerPop community was actually about deprecating and removing those type definitions provided in types/gremlin (see https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TINKERPOP-3069). I'm not aware of anyone within the TinkerPop community that is planning on maintaining that external third party package.

[Daniel Craig]

I will continue to rely on that package until such time as we are able to move to tinkerpop 4.0.  It would be shortsighted to deprecate it in my opinion. 

[Ken Hu]

Yea, that's understandable. I think the conversation around deprecating was to avoid confusion when TinkerPop 4 is released with native TypeScript support. I think it's reasonable to delay deprecating it while 3.7.x is still being actively supported.