JavaScript/TypeScript

JavaScript is employed by a range of engineering teams across Bloomberg, as the expressiveness of the language makes it a natural fit for describing business rules and application flow.

Uses range from web applications and communications channels to complex workflows for traders. The technologies and frameworks used to build JavaScript applications keep evolving – and our engineers are passionate about pushing the language to its limits.

A collaborative effort

Bloomberg is dedicated to supporting our more than 2,000 software engineers who write JavaScript, from providing feature parity for our proprietary toolkits and frameworks to leveraging open source tools and giving back to the community when we can. We are strongly committed to JavaScript, with over 10,000 front-end apps and one of the largest JavaScript codebases in the world – tens of millions of lines of code. Our internal JavaScript Guild is passionate about the future of the community and discovering how to use JavaScript in unique and revolutionary ways.

How we apply JavaScript to real-world problems

Terminal and web front-end architecture

Building long-lived and ephemeral desktop and web applications. Designing dynamic forms to financial tickets. Communications systems (instant messages, emails, shared documents, trading functions, research and analysis functions and a wide variety of tools).

Terminal and web front-end architecture

Data and news visualization

Data visualization is very important to us, whether it is on the Bloomberg Terminal, or on bloomberg.com. We use a variety of cutting-edge open source technologies to render charts, graphs, maps, and other visual aids to help our customers make sense of the data as efficiently as possible.

Data and news visualization

Streaming market data

The Bloomberg Terminal streams data ingested from exchanges and data providers worldwide to hundreds of thousands of users in real-time. We use highly-optimized JavaScript to efficiently stream data to each Bloomberg Terminal and make efficient DOM updates to render thousands of rows of data on the screen.

Streaming market data

A leading contributor to the JavaScript community

Bloomberg is a Silver Member of the OpenJS Foundation and an Associate Member of ECMA International. We participate in steering the direction of the JavaScript language, co-chairing TC39, the technical committee that determines the ECMAScript specification.

JavaScript has evolved into a ubiquitous and essential language relied upon by the world’s largest community of software developers. We hope that by investing in the web commons, we support not just ourselves, but the web itself. Some of the features Bloomberg has contributed to include: BigInt, Promise.allSettled, Class Fields, Decorators, Temporal, Record & Tuple, and more.

We are also regular sponsors of conferences including JSConf US, OpenJS World, NodeConf EU, React Europe and TSConf.

Read our latest stories

Our TypeScript journey

A few years ago, Bloomberg adopted TypeScript as a first-class supported language, which we have found to be a strong net positive. Since we launched our TypeScript platform support, more than 400 projects opted into TypeScript. Zero projects went back.

Read 10 Insights from Adopting TypeScript at Scale

Many Bloomberg engineers have worked on the TypeScript codebase, authoring headline features such as ES Private Fields in TypeScript 3.8, Private Methods in TypeScript 4.3, and Ergonomic Brand Checks in TypeScript 4.5.