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by quectophoton 492 days ago
I've been wanting to make a no-build webapp using Mithril.js[1][2], with plain-JS type annotations that don't require build steps (TypeScript's JSDoc syntax [3], but I'm looking forward to the proposed type annotations[4]). With something like this, type-checking would still require running a command when using Node.js, but it's just an optional developer dependency since the code would still be just standard JavaScript.

But in the end I've not done that because I figured it's more effort than it's worth, compared to just doing server-side rendering with other backend languages and just using JS where needed (not necessarily "raw" JS, I just mean it as in "not having a full-page component").

I'm just letting you know that there are definitely some people like me that would like if more JS tooling didn't require a build step or specific runtimes (like Deno or Bun) as a hard dependency.

[1]: https://github.com/MithrilJS/mithril-node-render

[2]: https://github.com/StephanHoyer/mithril-isomorphic-example/

[3]: https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/jsdoc-supported...

[4]: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-type-annotations

1 comments

kudos to the MithrilJS project & also for having earned visibility on OpenCollective <3 I can see the (much respected) history track of this project.

Having "survived" the "Internet Explorer ages" of the www, I can share that my heart always has a slot for "vanilla JS" (& anything towards its direction). When coding solo and/or for light-weight (enough) projects, I also tended to do pure JS.