🧢 The Truth About Node.js Typescript Support

No, you don’t need to wait to run Typescript with Node.js

Lately there is a news circling programming social media that Node.js added support for Typescript:

But this news is misleading and fake.

As we can read in the merge request, actually there was something else added to Node.js and the truth about Typescript is also different.

So, the new experimental feature actually doesn’t involve using Typescript per se. What it actually is is stripping Typescript from the source code.

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It means that you can use the flag to run Typescript files. But these files aren’t typechecked and transpired. But, Typescript types are removed from the code like they never been there.

It is useful for example when backend and frontend team share common code that is written in Typescript, but backend team doesn’t want to deal with Typescript because they write in vanilla Javascript.