Comment by newspaper1
1 day ago
I think it sucks because it transpiles to JavaScript and is an interpreted language. Users have to resolve the dependencies themselves and have the correct runtime. I definitely prefer my CLI tools be written in a compiled language with a single binary.
I agree, though one cool thing arriving lately (albeit with some major shortcomings) is the ability to compile binaries with deno or bun (and nodejs experimentally, I think).
With Go you can compile binaries with bindings for other binaries, like duckdb or sqlite or so on. With deno or bun, you're out of luck. It's such a drag. Regardless, it's been quite useful at my work to be able to send CLI utilities around and know they'll 'just work'. I maintain a few for scientific data processing and gardening (parsing, analysis, cleaning, etc) which is why the lack of duckdb bundling is such a thorn. I do wish I could use Go instead and pack everything directly into the binary.
you can already "compile" TS binaries with deno, but it'll include the runtime in it and etc. so it'll take some disk space but I think these days it's less of a concern than before
Totally, it's inconsequential for our use cases.
I think the binaries wind up being somewhere around 70mb. That's insane, but these are disposable tools and the cost is negligible in practice.