alt Hacker News> Today in 2025, TS offers so much more than the (TS)JSDoc implementation. Generics, Enums, Utility types, Type Testing in Vitest, typeguards, plus other stuff.
This was my main impetus for writing this article. Modern JSDoc uses the TypeScript language service. You can use generics, utility types, typeguards (including the `is` keyword), regex parsing, etc all with just JSDoc.
I used these features extensively (especially generics) in a personal project and managed to do it all in JSDoc.
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JSDoc does not understand typescript syntax though? The typescript language server just kinda plows through/over JSDoc sure, but try getting JSDoc to parse some of the TS-ified things that JSDoc has alternatives for.
https://github.com/jsdoc/jsdoc/issues/1917
https://github.com/jsdoc/jsdoc/issues/1917#issuecomment-1250...
I’m curious how type checking is possible in a JDoc project. As far as I’m aware there’s no way to get type checking to work without tsc or a TypeScript LSP plugin.
JSDoc is missing a lot of basic capabilities. For example a TypeDef is automatically exported which can cause collisions and forces you to repeat or inline types.
Types for classes are poor and often you'll find yourself creating a `.d.ts` file or `.ts` file to export non trivial types - however the target file doesn't know how to consume them.