Interfaces and Types in TypeScript

Understanding Interfaces and Types in TypeScript: Navigating Type Definitions

Patrick Karsh
4 min readFeb 3, 2024
You are not my type.

TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript, enhances the language with static types, offering tools to ensure code quality and predictability. Among its key features are interfaces and types, which, while often serving similar purposes, have distinct characteristics and use cases. This article delves into the differences between interfaces and types in TypeScript, shedding light on their unique attributes, advantages, and appropriate scenarios for use.

Interfaces

Interfaces in TypeScript are a powerful way to define contracts within your code as well as contracts with code outside of your project. They are primarily used to type-check an object’s shape, ensuring that objects have the expected structure.

Characteristics

  • Extensibility: Interfaces are extendable, allowing you to create new interfaces that extend existing ones, thus promoting reusability and scalability of code.
  • Declaration Merging: TypeScript supports declaration merging for interfaces. If you declare an interface multiple times with different properties, TypeScript will treat it as a single interface with merged properties, which is particularly useful for…

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Patrick Karsh

NYC-based Ruby on Rails and Javascript Engineer leveraging AI to explore Engineering. https://linktr.ee/patrickkarsh