Thank you a lot. Great work. I know it’s still experimental, but over time it will have a big impact on developer experience and will simplify the development workflow for a lot of projects.
this is the roadmap https://github.com/nodejs/loaders/issues/217.
We talked with the typescript team and we will give each other continous feedback on the progression. We made sure to take some precautions in order to avoid breaking the ecosystem. I still think in production, js is the way to go, so users should always transpile their ts files.
Could you expand on why transpiling is the right long-term strategy for production? I get that right now you don't support some TS-specific features like enums. Is that the concern? Those seem like a few legacy exceptions, new TS capabilities will be "just javascript".
Not transpiling would be great to reduce toolchain complexity and eliminate the need for sourcemaps just to understand exceptions and debug.
The first reason is because if we supported ts features that require transformation (such as enume) we would also need to support sourcemaps, so in the first iteration I decided not to, to avoid being overwhelmed. Right now we replace inline types with whitespace, so locations are preserved. We plan to add those features, probably behind a flag at the beginning. We need to move in small steps and think very carefully, every decision could make a huge impact on the ecosystem so I decided to start with the smalled subset possible.
That all makes sense, it sounds like you haven’t ruled out supporting TS directly in production, but it’s complex and you have to move carefully and you’re not sure if you’ll get all the way there. Is that right ?
