From Logic to Toolchains: An Empirical Study of Bugs in the TypeScript Ecosystem

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Tang, TianYi, Alimadadi, Saba, Sumner, Nick
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Tang, TianYi
Alimadadi, Saba
Sumner, Nick
author_facet Tang, TianYi
Alimadadi, Saba
Sumner, Nick
contents TypeScript has rapidly become a popular language for modern web development, yet its effect on software faults remains poorly understood. This paper presents the first large-scale empirical study of bugs in real-world TypeScript projects. We analyze 633 bug reports from 16 popular open-source repositories to construct a taxonomy of fault types, quantify their prevalence, and relate them to project characteristics such as size, domain, and dependency composition. Our results reveal a fault landscape dominated not by logic or syntax errors but by tooling and configuration faults, API misuses, and asynchronous error-handling issues. We show that these categories correlate strongly with build complexity and dependency heterogeneity, indicating that modern failures often arise at integration and orchestration boundaries rather than within algorithmic logic. A longitudinal comparison with JavaScript studies shows that while static typing in TypeScript has reduced traditional runtime and type errors, it has shifted fragility toward build systems and toolchains. These findings offer new insight into how language design and ecosystem evolution reshape the fault profiles of large-scale software systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_21186
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Logic to Toolchains: An Empirical Study of Bugs in the TypeScript Ecosystem
Tang, TianYi
Alimadadi, Saba
Sumner, Nick
Software Engineering
TypeScript has rapidly become a popular language for modern web development, yet its effect on software faults remains poorly understood. This paper presents the first large-scale empirical study of bugs in real-world TypeScript projects. We analyze 633 bug reports from 16 popular open-source repositories to construct a taxonomy of fault types, quantify their prevalence, and relate them to project characteristics such as size, domain, and dependency composition. Our results reveal a fault landscape dominated not by logic or syntax errors but by tooling and configuration faults, API misuses, and asynchronous error-handling issues. We show that these categories correlate strongly with build complexity and dependency heterogeneity, indicating that modern failures often arise at integration and orchestration boundaries rather than within algorithmic logic. A longitudinal comparison with JavaScript studies shows that while static typing in TypeScript has reduced traditional runtime and type errors, it has shifted fragility toward build systems and toolchains. These findings offer new insight into how language design and ecosystem evolution reshape the fault profiles of large-scale software systems.
title From Logic to Toolchains: An Empirical Study of Bugs in the TypeScript Ecosystem
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21186