Ambients in Typescript

Features

Ambient is a potent tool in Typescript. Let us talk about some of its features,

• Ambient declarations allow using existing well-liked JavaScript libraries.
• Ambient declarations assist in directly integrating a lot of JavaScript libraries into TypeScript.
• Ambient declarations is also a way to inform the Typescript compiler about existing variable, functions, etc.
• The declare keyword in the ambient declaration means that we declare the typing of a variable without their implementation.

Example

Let us look at an example of Ambient Declarations to understand this concept better,

var dif;
(function (dif) {    
   var Calc = (function () {   
      function Calc() {   
      }   
      Calc.prototype.doDif = function (x, v) {  
         return x - v;  
      }  
   })  
})

Let’s assume we have the above JS function to find the difference between two numbers. We want to use this function without going through the hassle of re-writing the whole function again. We will use Ambient Declarations for this task. First, we declare an Ambient module,

CalcDiff.d.ts

declare module dif{   
   export class Calc {   
      doSubtract(x:number, y:number) : number;   
   }  
}

Now, we will import this module in our JS file using the below code snippet,

/// <reference path = "CalcDiff.d.ts" />   
var obj = new dif.Calc();   
console.log(obj.doSubtract(100,60)); 

FAQs

1. What are the applications of Ambients in Typescript?
   Ambients are generally used to give or define the structure for non Typesciprt libraries. Ambients are used to import third-party libraries in Typescript. If the library imported is not present at the runtime, the code will crash without warning.
    
2. How to declare an Ambient module?
   The syntax to declare an Ambient module in Typescript looks something like this,

declare module module_name{
    //function, variable declaration
}

Key Takeaways

This Blog covered all the necessary points about Ambients in Typescript, discussing in-depth its functionality and the methods of the appliance of Abmients. And also its implementation in Typescript.

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