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by rtpg 947 days ago
Honestly I think the blame[0] is to share across the board. I have read through a bunch of typescript lang issues on this topic, and the general issue is that Typescript doesn't want tsc to do certain kinds of rewrites during compilation (code transpilations that go beyond the most simple things).

This makes sense but honestly means a lot of QoL fixes are kinda impossible to do. At this point I, personally, would almost want tsc (the compiler component) to stop being almost a good bundler and remove some features. Every project I've worked on that uses tsc directly ends up needing a "come to Jesus" moment where a "real" bundler gets introduced and suddenly a lot of stuff becomes easier. Doubly frustrating for me to feel this because tsc does a lot of stuff and it is hard to imagine how Typescript the language moves forward without Typescipt the compiler. I just really don't want to type `.js` for files that are, pre-build, `.ts`.

[0]: "blame" here meant in the weakest sense of "there are people who could make decisions in another way to make this better". Not so much in assigning moral blame
1 comments
iainmerrick 947 days ago
I still don’t fully understand why TypeScript needed to be involved in the discussion at all. TSC tries to do far too much and doesn’t do most of it very well. The tsconfig format is restrictive and annoying.

TS would be a lot better if it were just a type checker and nothing else (which is more or less what you get when you switch to a proper bundler).

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rtpg 947 days ago
I think it's tricky, because if Typescript _didn't_ show up with tsc, then they would have had their fate bound to Webpack or something like that. And of course tsc and the language server go hand in hand. It's hard to understate the positive effects of tsc existing across the entire ecosystem!

I suppose in a way I'm complaining about a (mostly) non-issue, since bundlers all have good typescript support at this point.

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iainmerrick 946 days ago
Yeah, overall I love TS as a language, and the tooling can be made to work well.

I just feel like there's a bunch of functionality in TSC that's more troublesome than it is useful. The same could be said of Node, of course.

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