WebStorm from JetBrains has good TypeScript support. You could look into that as VS alternative.
Another question: our TypeScript compile-times are approaching 5/6 seconds whenever gulp watch triggers. Imo this is too long for a workable frontend workflow. Did you guys find a way to incrementally compile TS with gulp?
No, we did not. Our stack is still on the grow but we're starting to run into the same problem.
That said, we have many small files, so I'm pretty certain that for us, setting up gulp to always only recompile whichever file changed (which we currently don't do) should be good enough. Afaik there's ways to do this with gulp but I did not investigate yet.
Do you guys manage to only recompile changed files?
I tried using https://www.npmjs.org/package/gulp-changed, but couldn't get that to work in the timebox I allowed myself. Also, just passing the changed file to the typescript compiler would probably not work in our case (since we also need to pass in our type definitions in the same compiler pass), and recompiling a single file might lead to errors in a different file importing the changed file that you would miss with this setup...
The tsc executable does have a -watch flag itself for incremental compilation, which presumably takes into account these dependencies. So may be the solution is to use that outside of gulp (since gulp-tsc doesn't seem to be able to launch the compiler in watch mode).
Another question: our TypeScript compile-times are approaching 5/6 seconds whenever gulp watch triggers. Imo this is too long for a workable frontend workflow. Did you guys find a way to incrementally compile TS with gulp?