Just a headsup, these days the typescript tooling is actually ergonomic with esbuild and vite. If you still use javascript and know about this tooling, I am very curious why you would choose to do so, because esbuild will literally compile AND bundle all your js before you can say "compilation".
What if you're not building a browser app. For a server side, NodeJS app? Sure, you can add a build step on the back end, but that's not free, as it comes with setup, having to run a transpiler before your code.
Also, using esbuild to transpile your TS will not actually check the types. It just transforms it back to JS. For typescript, you really need the official library which is slow and bloated.
Yes you need an extra build step, but really I cannot overstate how simple this step is. There is no webpack config hell, there is no giant dependency chain, there is no long wait for anything, there is no magic file globs and mimetypes. In 10-100ms, esbuild (a single small dependency) will take 3 command line arguments, grab all your linked TS from a single TS entrypoint file, and spit out a single (possibly minified) js file that you can immediately invoke with node. Instead of node bla.js, you do esbuild && node bla.js, you don't care what happens inside.
Indeed it will not check your types, but as stated elsewhere your IDE can do this for you. This is actually beautiful because it allows you to get correctness feedback on your code but your code will never fail to run due to arbitrary type complaints. If you later feel like you want the full correctness of TS, maybe during CI/CD, you can run the slower compiler and get a gatekeeper telling you if you are doing something fishy.
> What if you're not building a browser app. For a server side, NodeJS app? Sure, you can add a build step on the back end, but that's not free, as it comes with setup, having to run a transpiler before your code.
It is free if your IDE uses the TypeScript language server and gives you errors integrated with your code editor. You don't have to transpile if you don't want to. You can, as you said, just use esbuild to strip away the type information.
> For typescript, you really need the official library which is slow and bloated.
See above. You absolutely don't. And it's not slow or bloated at all. It has incremental builds, which are essentially instantaneous after the initial build.
