Comment by Curosinono
1 hour ago
TypeScript is now 13 years old. They could have, by now, made it a lot easier to be able to use Typescript in a browser out of the box without magic behind it.
1 hour ago
TypeScript is now 13 years old. They could have, by now, made it a lot easier to be able to use Typescript in a browser out of the box without magic behind it.
Typescript certainly hasn't been resting on its laurels.
Typescript has always worked pretty well in the browser. You can use the full Typescript LSP in vscode.dev or github.dev just fine.
I've even seen websites ship the Typescript compiler as a part of their bundle. It's not the most efficient use of bandwidth, but especially for corporate internal sites if it increases velocity it might not be a bad trade-off. Though it made more sense in the AMD and SystemJS days than in the ESM.
Typescript also support JSDoc mode very well where you have all your types in comments instead of inline. JSDoc type checked files run just fine in the browser without transpilation.
Typescript has also invested a lot into "Isolated Modules" and "Verbatim Module Syntax" and linting for such. This tooling makes it easier to keep modules cleanly type strippable without needing to run the full compiler. (This is something that Node support for Typescript requires, for example.) "Isolated Modules" also get code ready for the Type Annotations support if that gets to the next stage with TC-39. It also makes it possible to bundle a small, fast type stripper in the browser as a module loading plugin, should ESM get module loading plugins ahead of Type Annotations support. (There are proposals for that in front of TC-39 as well.)