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🧢 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.
That way the source code in Typescript is intact and backend team still can use it.
So it’s not adding support for Typescript, but rather a way to strip it during execution.
Now, if it comes to executing Typescript with Node.js it was already possible. So nothing changes here. You can just use Typescript transpiler that transpiler code to JavaScript and run it with Node.js. There’s even an instruction how to do it.
However developers usually reach for the ts-node package that handles everything for them, so that they don’t have to compile Typescript to JavaScript manually.
As you can see, it is already possible to run Typescript with Node.js. And the new feature in Node.js is not about running Typescript, but about stripping Typescript from the code and running it as Javascript.
BTW. WOW. You are really interested in TypeScript! I’ve designed TypeScript card game called Summon The JSON: TypeScript. What a coincidence! You can order them now!
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