[yxre]

Why not keep the package separate? I also thought of reflect-metadata separately, and it doesn't hurt to allow users to install plugins to augment core compiler behavior.

Some people have very tight constraints for payload size, and types could blow up payloads

[jauntywundrkind]

It's hard for a plugin to always be begging for sufficient hooks & access to read out the data. Maybe an external project is fine, but it needs some real TLC, not just being a side-quest by a maintainer or two.

Conceptually it feels like there should be/needs to be some buy in on high, a shared vision that tsc is not the one, only & singular tool in the typescript-verse that ever can or will care about types. Trying to constantly break in & exfiltrate the data isn't ever going to get a position where the world takes this seriously; typescript needs really should gladly be opening the gates.

As for whether the type information is in fact part of the payload, that's a separate question, and one that should ideally be configurable. It's definitely a bit of a complex situation in general; ideally we'd have good/easy ways for libraries to include this information but then we also want want to be able to strip it out easily.

Maybe we just regenerate it as needed from ts source of libraries when we need it. But that implies not running a single typescript compile with one set of settings but running many compiles, as each library has its own tsconfig it'll need that informs how files are laid out & other sundry details. I might be overcomplicating. Perhaps we could just generate a foo.reflect.js, that has all the reflection data? There's options.