[avianlyric]

Erm, you do know that a founding principle of TS, is that the “compile” step is literally just stripping out the type annotations. You could implement it with a Regex if you really wanted to.

The only place this rule is broken, is TS Enums, and that generally considered to have been a mistake, but one that too old to rectify.

[imbnwa]

>The only place this rule is broken, is TS Enums, and that generally considered to have been a mistake, but one that too old to rectify.

Why is that?

[avianlyric]

Historical accident I think. JS has no enum concept, but early on TS devs believed that enums were an important feature. To TS produces some small JS fragments for every enum to mimic enum behaviour. It’s not exactly a lot of code, or deep woven into the final output, but it is code that doesn’t have exist in the input.

Later I think people realised that enums aren’t that important, and certainly not important enough to break the golden rule. But alas it was too late. Maybe JS will get an enum concept, and then TS can drop its hack. But until then, it’s the one spot where the TS “compiler” produces output code that doesn’t exist in its input.

[eknkc]

Yeah, bun for example can execute typescript files directly. It does not include the tsc or anything, it just strips out type annotations and executes the remanining file that is valid JS.

esbuild does the same I believe.