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I'm very impressed with the collaboration we've seen from TypeScript to make Node integration a success. It is a team effort with all participants leaning in. Extension rewriting in TS 5.7 is the first treat. This was directly motivated by the Node use-case. And there's more to come! 💙

Rob Palmer@robpalmer.bsky.social

TypeScript 5.7 is released 🎉 🔶 ES2024 library types 🔷 Checker: Never-initialized variables 🔷 Checker: Stricter JSON imports 🔷 Emit: Extension rewriting (*.ts to *.js) 🔷 DTS: Computed methods 🔷 IDE: Better tsconfig discovery 🔷 Perf: Code Caching ⚡️ 2.5x faster startup

Honestly the only change to TS that has made me cringe and think through the use-cases. I'm *very* torn to put it safely.

This is a move that makes it feel like TS is it's own language when it reality it's a superset of JS designed as a superset to work with types stripped off the syntax. Imports are no longer required to be valid for the environment you are authoring.

If this is the direction it's taking, either knowingly or accidentally, another TS / Flow will emerge. I don't want it to, but watch it happen.

I get it. The rewriting is a semi-complex runtime transform with a runtime helper. One motive is to promote npm packages publishing *.d.ts files. Another is to facilitate maintaining *.js as the executable format for publishing. @searyanc.dev did not merge it accidentally.

I'll have to search through the issues and read through the thought process that lead to the change in opinion from the team.

In short, Node.js started being able to execute TypeScript directly, and we did not want to leave users in a postion where they couldn't publish their TypeScript code without converting all of their code back to JS extension imports that may or may not be exectuable as TS.

To be clear, the positon has always been "TypeScript describes code that can be executed". Node couldn't run TS or with TS extensions, so, we didn't rewrite anything. Now it can, so it should work. May as well make it work well.

I guess I don't understand why node didn't just update the resolution algo to pretend it's JS code like every single TS loader implementation does.

To be clear, I don't have a horse in this race. It just feels weird and I don't like the way node approached this and the fact they're (potentially bad?) decisions are making their way into tooling so quickly.

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"Write your TS code as if it were JS and being transpired to the same location on disk" has been my approach to anything that isn't fed through a bundler for the last 2 years. All the code I've written in that time can't just be ran with the new node imp.

transpiled* (still haven't added this to any of my dictionary as it still feels bad to use all these years later and I try to avoid it 😅).