I think this + node:test makes Node.js a pretty compelling sensible default for most things now. Running things with `tsx` was such a QoL improvement when it happened, but it didn't solve everything.
Runtime type assertion at the edges is mostly solved through `zod` and tools like `ts-rest` and `trpc` makes it so much easier to do full-stack Typescript these days.
This. It's 2025 and the node ecosystem is finally usable by default!
ESM modules just work with both Node and Typescript, Node can run .ts files, and there's the a good enough test runner built in. --watch. The better built in packages - `node:fs/promises` - are nice with top-level await for easier async loops.
It took a while to convince everyone involved to just be pragmatic, but it's nice now.
This is great to hear, but perhaps comes too late for people like myself. Node.js has been by go-to platform from around 2014 until last year. But around September last year, I found myself thrust into the .NET ecosystem (due to a client project). Within a few months, I realized that it too, had finally become usable by default (unlike the last time I tried it, when it was too tightly coupled to Windows). In fact, it felt like what Node.js would be, if it had strong typing built-in, and had a good standard library that eliminated a lot of the module management and churn. I'm now finding it hard to return to Node.js.
I can second this experience. I arrived roughly 10 years ago, right in time to see netcore1.0 emerge. Been onboard even since. You should absolutely check it out. The compilation story (native aot) is what I'm currently most excited about it.
F# is a great FP language that runs on .NET and there's a growing field of FP proponents working in C#, sort of a Trojan Horse situation trying for a best of both worlds (easy onboarding for C# junior devs, but deep FP options thanks to things like C#'s clever LINQ syntax). LanguageExt is a big part of some of those ecosystems: https://github.com/louthy/language-ext
What's the story with supporting CommonJS libraries? I've tried to update many projects to ESM multiple times over the years, and every time, I ended up backing out because it turned out that there was some important upstream library that was still CommonJS - or even if we fixed those issues, our downstream NPM consumers wouldn't be able to consume EJS. So then you have to go down this rabbit hole of dual compilation, which actually means using something other than tsc.
With "type": "module" there's very few reasons to do dual compilation unless you have very conservative downstreams that hate promises and async/await, and even then there's mitigations now (sync `require()` of async ESM).
It's been a while since I've had a trouble importing an upstream CommonJS library. Often it is easy enough in the rare cases where upstream is particularly old/gnarly you can vendorize an ESM build with rollup or esbuild.
That said, CommonJS is also now a strong maintenance signal for me and if a library doesn't have recent ESM builds I start to wonder if it is at all well maintained and not just a pile of tech debt to avoid. JSR has started becoming my first place to search for a library I need, ahead of NPM, because of JSR's focus (and scoring systems) on ESM first and good Typescript types.
I can’t help but think that none of these would have happened without Deno doing it first. It was basically the pragmatic Node before Node started to get reasonable.
Watching NodeJS fill in these gaps the last 5 years or so has been great, I strongly prefer using built-in stuff as much as possible now to avoid bloating the modules and becoming dependent on a thousand random people being good-stewards of their packages.
Well, only goes to show how different everyone's experiences are. I guess I've had the opposite one: Node+CommonJS was something I was extremely comfortable with.
The slow adoption of ESM by Node, with many compatibility missteps, the thousand papercuts around TS, the way frontend-centric toolchains kinda-sorta paper over the whole thing, letting it fester, and the way people have been acting like things are ready for primetime for over a decade while diligently testing them in production, all of that came later. To the point of having me wondering how did people work with TypeScript before ~5.4 - though evidently they did, and had few if any of the same complaints!
Baffling but IIWII. Anyway, only this year I discovered a pure `tsx` + ESM workflow had become viable OOTB, to no little surprise. I perceive that as the toolchain becoming unfucked just as randomly as it became fucked when Node 16 did what it did. Not that it didn't take a couple years for TS to "invent" the right compiler flags that it took to tell it to stay out of the runtime's way, too.
So a good year overall. Hope they don't break it again because when they do it's an uphill struggle to convince them that they have.
You're being downmodded for not providing any supporting arguments, but there's some compelling protection for malicious modules in these other JS implementations.
That's... weird. And kind of hypocritical, given the quality of your own comment which (a) mentioned downvotes and (b) used a few more words that boil down to "module protection". At this point I'm not exactly elevating the conversation either, for which I apologize. But I do think brief comments like mine and the one I replied to are perfectly fine.
I moved on to Biome (which replaces both ESLint and Prettier) and while the IDE extensions have been a bit buggy, it's much faster and has fewer dependencies. It was always a pain to set up ESLint + Prettier.
ESLint these days doesn't have any styling related lints (unless you opt into them) which means that it works out-of-the-box with Prettier (or Biome's formatter, presumably).
My fear with Biome is missing out on type-aware lints, but I know Oxlint has had some success integrating the new Go typescript compiler, so maybe that will work out for Biome as well.
Good to someone, somewhere, telling everyone else what good is.
Arguably, code formatters should be configurable, to get a format for your code that you want. Unfortunately, prettier isn't one, and it is a form of regression in many communities at the cost of choice pruning.
It might be great for a CI pipeline for constraining how code should look (use prettier, dumbass!), but it isn't great for actually formatting code, as it just makes the code "prettier".
Using it as a precommit hook in OSS projects makes it so that people can write code however they want. But it ends up in the repo following the guidelines of the repo. Minimizing unnecessary back-and-forth with PRs. Extremely useful in my opinion.
Even though prettier has defaults, but they can be modified to quite some extent to suit your projects needs: https://prettier.io/docs/options
> Using it as a precommit hook in OSS projects makes it so that people can write code however they want.
That is the point of a formatter, so any formatter would do that (and there were many more active projects to allow formatting before prettier came around).
> quite some extent
Not really, and I have written prettier plugins to get around that constraint.
IMO, its not great, which is kind of how things work out when you try to do everything in one project.
> That is the point of a formatter, so any formatter would do that (and there were many more active projects to allow formatting before prettier came around).
No arguments here. You are free to choose the formatter you want.
> Not really, and I have written prettier plugins to get around that constraint.
Or you could simply use those better formatters you were talking about.
Yes, with the difference that Google would have to be compromised in order to poison the go distributable containing fmt tool. With js, it’s enough to poison any single one of the 1400 dependencies of the linter
I forgot that even though fmt will never suffer from middle man attacks downloading the Go toolchain, the standard library already covers 100% of the uses cases someone cares about using Go for, and no one is using CGO.
I used to use CGO quite a lot in linux-embedded environment.
And we had huge dependency chains as well to non-standard library stuff, nowhere near as bad as an average nodejs project but still not free from the problem.
I'm very much in favor of TS support directly in node. vitest has made it easier these days, but I've lost too much time over the years getting the balance just right when configuring test environments for .ts files.
trpc and ts-rest are a different animal in my opinion. I'm happy to use either one but won't deal with them in production. For trpc that's mainly due to the lack of owning API URLs and being able to more clearly manage deprecating old URLs gracefully.
For ts-rest I just tend to prefer owning that setup myself, usually with zod and shared typings for API request/response pairs. It also does irk me every time I import what is clearly an RPC tool named "-rest"
i switched to python a while ago. it has batteries included. i feel so much better now that i dont have to debug all the quirks of a half-baked system.
I work with Node every day, and the library ecosystem is a nightmare. Just keeping a project from falling apart takes a huge amount of effort. Libraries are either abandoned when the author moves on, or they push major releases almost every month. And there’s a new CVE practically every week.
Python libraries are much more stable and reliable.
> Just keeping a project from falling apart takes a huge amount of effort
I think the culture of importing libraries with lots of dependencies is a big contributor.
> Libraries are either abandoned when the author moves on
This applies to any OSS project. Generally speaking popular abandoned libraries get forked.
> or they push major releases almost every month
This sounds like a very bad library to use. I would not recommend having this type of library as a dependency in Node or even in Python for that matter.
> Python libraries are much more stable and reliable.
Not sure what would make python libraries magically more stable and more reliable. Maybe libraries with minimal dependencies would could be the reason. That is why I recommend 0 or minimal dependecy libraries for node.
I work with both node and python. I agree with you on node, it is a dependency disaster. But regarding python the problem is not with the libraries themselves but in the circus of pip vs conda vs poetry vs pipenv vs uv vs ...
It doesn’t. The comment you’re replying to is referring to tsx, the package that lets you execute ts files, not to running files with the tsx extension.
This is great up until you get to the fact that typescript will not be accepted under node_modules [0].
That leads me to ask, what about project dependencies? I wrote a lib for my data models in typescript and I want to import that into my app in node, in typescript? Does the rule only apply to npm packages? There’s opportunity here…
I wrote a runtime in golang that runs typescript (well, JavaScript in general). The grafana folks have sobek that all they need is to add type striping. I feel like if there’s one runtime where typescript could be adopted fully and it would change the world is Node.js. No transpiler, no typescript-go, no rust (well, maybe some rust ;) just a great parser that will keep track of the source map and types in debug mode (for tracing).
Either way, kudos to the node team, contributors, for pulling in the goal posts to make the kick to launch shorter. I’m still a fan of bun, and my own runtime, but node is the standard by which we all are kinda following. I also like that the embedding api is simple and clean to use now so if you want to make an executable, you can.
"Written only in TypeScript" might put it better. If your module ships TypeScript source and a JS build as it should, then this will never affect it. Otherwise, to support stripping arbitrary modules would immediately compromise the design goal of light weight, due to the torrent of ill-founded and -formed bug reports incorrectly raised on Node that would follow. ("Don't make the maintainers' lives too miserable to continue the work" being also of course an implicit goal.)
I can sort of understand the publishing argument, since npm doesn't solve for this at all, unlike JSR:
"You publish TypeScript source, and JSR handles generating API docs, .d.ts files, and transpiling your code for cross-runtime compatibility."
Not allowing it for private modules doesn't make much sense to me, though. It either forces me to use a loader, or now figure out a JS build step which I have been more than happy to avoid up until now.
The implication is that the capability is implemented to conditionally allow, which I suspect has been deliberately avoided, less because the change would require much technical effort (though it might; I don't know) than because the PR to make it offers another opportunity to keep that door nailed firmly shut.
As a past and present module author, I don't feel myself unduly burdened by the need to maintain the tooling to support the work I publish. Or present-ish, anyway; last time around it was Bower and about Node 8, and the experience these days is worlds more comfortable.
I can see why others would feel differently, but again, I'm not really here to argue preferences. If you'd like to fill your afternoon instead with an enjoyable, on-theme read, try the UNIX-HATERS Handbook: https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
Last actually note-worthy improvement I heard of was properly supporting import/export (although do you still need to use the .mjs hack?), but I've been out of the loop here for sometime so would be nice to know what they've added since.
Sounds like the obvious correct solution, making .cjs and .mjs obsolete - unless of course someone uses import() statements exclusively, in which case I need to ask: why?
It is surprising for me to see these features finally being added to Node after such a long time. Especially so when I remember reading discussion after discussion about how something like this wasn't possible. I touched on this in a blog post some time ago [1]. Glad Node is catching up.
I don't see in your blogpost any sources cited regarding anyone saying that ES modules were infeasible.
Additionally, io.js actually forked off due to internal drama which started with Ben Noordhuis having changed some pronouns here and there and people wanting to cancel him for that, to which he picked up his toys and left the sandbox.
It so happened that aside from being competent himself, he had competent people on his side, which eventually forced those governing Node.js to concede.
using, memory64, undici, async local storage, ESM import improvements, type stripping, local storage / session storage, env file support, built in file watching. Those are just the ones I mainly remember. There is a lot more.
> Currently the best PG driver[1] depends on a single guy.
Definitely a problem, but funding good Postgres/MongoDB/SQLite should be handled by AWS, Microsoft, Google, and other orgs that sell database services.
>> Currently the best PG driver[1] depends on a single guy.
> Definitely a problem, but funding good Postgres/MongoDB/SQLite should be handled by AWS, Microsoft, Google, and other orgs that sell database services.
A good chunk of PG development is done by employees of those companies (*). Of course they could (and probably should) always do more. But even if they invest more, it's not obvious that the marginal effort is best invested in some language's drivers...
Disclaimer: I'm paid by one of those big companies.
It's an issue, but not a new issue and not an issue introduced by NPM or introduced by package managers.
People were cuddling and pasting code from random people on the Internet they didn't understand for many years before package managers where there were zero maintainers. Many people that don't properly understand supply chain issues still are.
As a quick aside, “them” is an object pronoun, not a subject pronoun. The correct word you needed is “they”.
You couldn’t phrase your original question as a statement “Them have though.” That’s often a quick test for valid English grammar. With the correct pronoun, it makes more sense: “They have though.”
As another example, take this sentence: “Have you seen them though?”
“You” is the subject of that sentence, and “them” is the object.
It's short for "Have them [Node bozos improved it], though?"
Or, equally likely it, refers to deno and bun ("deno and bun has really made Node focus and improve", "Have them (deno and bun) really made Node focus and improve, though?")
I’m not a heavy JS/TS dev so here’s an honest question: why not use Bun and forget about node? Sure I understand that not every project is evergreen but isn’t Bun a much runtime in general? It supports TS execution from day 1, has much faster dependency resolution, better ergonomics… and I could keep going.
I know I’m just a single data point but I’ve had a lot of success migrating old node projects to bun (in fact I haven’t used node itself since Bun was made public)
Again, I might be saying something terribly stupid because JS/TS isn’t really my turf so please let me know if I’m missing something.
I've mainly worked with Node for now 8 years, and recently switched to Deno. Even that switch was hard to do; not because things don't work, but you don't know when they won't.
Node has its share of flaws, but it's the de facto baseline against which things are tested and developed. I'm somewhat more comfortable working with The Main Thing.
The JavaScript ecosystem is nightmarish enough that many developers don't want to switch to the Next Cool Thing. I think many of us have had enough fatigue caused by new build tools, new bundlers, new runtimes, etc.
As of right now, Bun is not compelling enough for the potential headaches down the line.
(Maybe there won't be any, but I've spent weeks dealing with incompatibilities caused by a single TS minor update (which should've been breaking). Days chasing after dependency problems, after missing docs, etc.)
Because Node is controlled by and maintained via the OpenJS Foundation. Bun is a venture-backed startup. That would be fine, but multiple, direct requests from me to the founder (Jared) about what the business model is (what I personally need to say "yes" or "no") have gone without response every time.
That led me to the assumption that Bun may very well be technically superior (or at least on the track to being so), but I can't bet anything significant or long-term on it. I need to know that this isn't just an exit vehicle for the founder (masquerading as a desire to fix JS server runtimes). Silence to a simple (dare I say, obvious) question doesn't bode well.
I have tried fully switching to bun repeatedly since it came out and every time I got 90% of the way there only to hit a problem that couldn't be worked around. Last I tried I was still stuck on some libraries requiring napi functions that weren't implemented in bun yet, as well an issue I forget but it was vaguely something like `opendir` silently ignoring the `recursive` option causing a huge headache.
I'm waiting patiently for bun to catch up because I would love to switch but I don't think its ready for production use in larger projects yet. Even when things work, a lot of the bun-specific functionality sounds nice at first but feels like an afterthought in practice, and the documentation is far from the quality of node.js
I agree. I've tried the Node TS and test runner features, and they are still (not yet) as good as Bun's. So for now sticking with Bun for those.
Really, in the Node ecosystem you eventually learn not to put all your eggs in one basket. Different things excel in different aspects. Here is my preferred setup for now:
Bun.js:
As a Node runtime, and for TS execution and test running. I tried lots: TSX, TS-Node, Node itself
NPM
For executing tooling scripts
PNPM
For installing dependencies. It's simply better than the rest (npm, yarn, bun) for several reasons
Biome.js
For linting (superior to every other tool I tried)
The bun test runner is definitely a lot better for testing than Node's.
But really, any test runner is beter than Node's: that thing is awful. It's like they looked at all the test runners in existence, and instead of copying what they all did, decided "let's make things harder for no apparent reason."
> I’m not a heavy JS/TS dev so here’s an honest question: why not use Bun and forget about node?
Why would you switch from runtime A to runtime B? I mean, you presented no reason at all, let alone a compelling one, to pick either one. So what leads you to believe it is a reasonable idea to waste time switching runtimes?
I dislike being on the bleeding edge for things. NodeJS is the most supported in the JS ecosystem. I find it much better to just be on the "default" option for things. You know, choose boring technology.
Is it a boring technology? I remember trying Node.js when it just came out, and I don't think all that much improved. Whole node.js always felt one step forward, two steps back. A lot of early design decisions still hurt it.
I would call it stagnated before I call it boring.
If you are choosing from "all backend technologies", Node may or may not count as boring. It's certainly not as boring as Java.
If, for whatever reason, you need to run JS outside the browser, then Node seems the most boring of all the possible options. Certainly "rewriting all our JS code in Java" sounds a lot less boring.
For me - it doesn't support secure and reliable dependency vendoring.
The best way to do this atm. is using (and configuring) yarn for zero-installs.
This keeps dependencies inside the codebase so that:
* Issues can be easily traced to the code that actually ran - development and deployment are the same.
* Deployment doesn't depend on package repositories.
* Deployment is secure from many kinds of attacks.
* It is possible to transparently patch packages.
* Development is only internet dependent when adding a new package.
* and the best ease-of-use - no reinstall when changing branches.
Bun is still a toddler: it's not ready for primetime.
Simple example: you know how at the command line you can type "npm run", and then type a character or two, hit tab, and the appropriate script from your `package.json` will autocomplete? And if you keep going (eg. "npm run knex") you can do the same thing to autocomplete arguments?
Bun still hasn't figured out how to do that (https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/6037), even though they can all but copy NPM's (already written) completions. I really liked using bun when I played around with it (and it ran my codebase perfectly, without issue) ... but if they can't handle something as simple as Bash completions, they're clearly not ready for the big leagues.
Your indicator of technology maturity is "is there an autocomplete script for my shell" ? I have autocomplete working on any CLI app I make before it's even functional.
I switched to deno for new projects ~1 year ago and it’s only been joy. There’s a shockingly small amount of friction to switch over, and there are so so many benefits
I have only one issue I've encountered with Deno that mattered (so to speak) and it's probably my fault. I actually created an issue for it (https://github.com/denoland/deno/issues/30433).
My project config is weird (slightly more sophisticated that my repro), so, it's probably on me. Otherwise I absolutely love Deno. It makes TypeScript simple and joyful. It's the simplicity this language/tooling ecosystems badly needs in my opinion. Sometimes I feel like it makes TypeScript feel a bit more like working with Go; you can just throw a main.ts in there and build an excellent CLI from it in minutes.
I'm glad you've said this. I have a project at nearly a perfect point to try out that cutover. Not that it isn't nice to understand the circa 2018-2022 TS stack, but it sure would be nice not to have to. (Our ancestors had the same discussions about cfront(1). Everything old is new again.)
The best thing is that they are shipping this as "type stripping" which means that there are no sourcemaps involved, making it zero-cost in production!
Yup, I'm in the same boat. Been using Bun for a year or so, and enjoying the many quality of life improvements. I still use Node when the project requires it, but I'm actively moving them over to Bun when I can. Still it's great to see Node continues to improve in its own way, benefiting a wider audience.
One of Typescript's design goals is that removing all type-related parts of the source text should yield a valid JavaScript file. A typescript compiler does not generate code (unlike, say, PureScript).
You can run a typechecker (such as tsc) that check various properties of your code statically, relying on the type information. It is then erased.
The same applies, say, to Python: type annotations are ignored at runtime. Somehow similarly, Java's type information is also partly erased in the bytecode; in particular, all the information about parametrized types. (This is to say nothing about actual machine code.)
This is true but these are also old features, and the TS team have stated that they will not add any more features like those, and to a certain extent regret adding them initially (particularly decorators, which iirc were added because the Angular framework wanted to use them). You can also see that these features aren't really being updated to match recent Typescript developments (parameter properties can't do true private properties, const enums don't work with isolated modules, etc).
I don't think those features are ever going to go away, because they've been around for so long and are so widely used. But I generally use erasableSyntaxOnly in new projects, because I find it's useful when my typescript source matches the generated Javascript code as much as possible.
> I find it's useful when my typescript source matches the generated Javascript code as much as possible.
Is this that worth? In the past I was able to read past async/await desugaring generated by TypeScript, and there are several useful non-JS syntaxes that are much easier to read than that (e.g. enums). Of course it would be great if ECMAScript eventually adopts them, but that doesn't seem like a strict requirement for me.
Async/await was implemented according to the ECMAScript spec - for a while it existed in typescript but not yet in browser runtimes, but it was fully specced out as a javascript feature rather than a typescript one. And when configured to emit ESNext JS files, typescript would emit the async/await calls verbatim, rather than transpiling them. After all, at that time async/await was valid, spec-compliant javascript (that hadn't yet been implemented in all browsers).
This is true for a number of features, most recently explicit resource management, that required syntax that was part of ECMAScript, supported in typescript, but not yet implemented in mainstream runtimes. In these cases, typescript is doing the same thing as Babel and converting new JS to old.
The syntaxes under discussion are ones that were implemented in typescript without an ECMAScript proposal, and typically are completely non-standard, and may well never be implemented in browsers, or if they are, be implemented completely differently. For example, the original decorators implementation was completely different to the one now being proposed, and enums could well end up going in the same direction.
This confusion about what is typescript, and what is javascript is exactly why I think avoiding the typescript-only features is a good idea. I've seen a lot of people make this mistake (and it's a very reasonable mistake to make!) and I think it's easier to explain what typescript is actually doing if you make it clear that it's only doing type-level stuff.
How useful is it exactly that you accept to not use DX improving syntax like constructor properties, enums, etc? To me, someone who uses these features _a lot_, this would be a terrible trade. Seems more like people push this out of ideology and because TS is never going to be part of node itself (since its implementation is just way too slow)
It's useful as a tool for communication and simplification. Ignoring those features, typescript is just javascript with type annotations, which makes understanding how something works easier. I've worked with a number of developers who have been confused about what's a typescript feature, and what's a javascript feature, because this boundary feels blurred (particularly when working with modern ESNext syntax that might not be implemented in browsers but is understood by typescript). Being able to say clearly: everything after a colon (and some other places) is typescript, everything else is javascript is a great way of helping people understand what's going on.
In terms of the tradeoff, I rarely, if ever, use those features in the first place. For enums, I'd rather just use string literal types, which are slightly easier to write and compose, potentially assigning them to variable names if I think that's clearer for a given use-case. For constructor properties, they don't work for private properties which is the most common property I'm writing, so I don't really see the value.
The two other features that are disabled are namespaces and modules that contain code, and `import ... =`, both of which have clearer JS alternatives.
FWIW, you can enable those features in node, although that's still behind an experimental flag. It's marginally slower (because the translation is slightly more complex than replacing types with whitespace) and it requires sourcemaps under the hood, but if you really want those features you can have them. Or you can use an alternate runtime that supports them out of the box (Deno, Bun). But even then, I think they make teaching and understanding the language more complicated and I wouldn't personally recommend them. (Assuming someone might listen to the personal recommendation of a random HN comment!)
Agreed about TS, but Python type annotations are not ignored. They are executed as code (all type annotations are valid expressions) and the results are stored on the module/class/function object that contains the annotated variable
Python type annotations get turned into metadata which other tools may inspect at runtime, but the Python runtime itself does nothing with it. It's just well-structured comments.
In Python basically everything is executable, and so are type annotations.
Somewhat related: you technically can access some type metadata in TypeScript at runtime using the `emitDecoratorMetadata` and `experimentalDecorators` tsconfig options, along with Microsoft's `reflect-metadata` polyfill package. There was a trend at one point where people were writing database ORMs using decorator metadata (e.g. Typegoose, TypeORM, and MikroORM).
This of course requires your build tool to actually understand the TS type system, which is why it's not supported in tools like esbuild and tsx (which uses esbuild under the hood).
>so at best it saves you a transpilation pass and doesn't improve safety.
That's a bit misleading. Node being able to run TS code does not "improve safety", because that's not where the type checking happens. You can do type checking in your editor, or various other points in your toolchain.
Node being able to run TS code reduces the friction in writing TS code, which indirectly helps with type safety.
Except it doesn't. In anything serious, you have to wait for a full type check to happen before you run your TS code. Why would you run code that has not been checked yet and could throw very weird errors like undefined property access?
That just doesn't make sense. Yes, you can wait for your editor in your current open file, if you are lucky and the change in the open file doesn't break anything downstream in another file that is not yet open. In best case you have such simple code that nothing breaks, and in worst case, you have to still run it with type-checking - on top of running it in type-stripping-mode, because you got weird errors in runtime. This is a net negative.
This whole situation is there because we are trying to workaround the slow TSC. It's not a feature, it's something we actively work around. We try to whitewash now the obviously less useful "solution" of running code without its core features enabled: type checking. To me this is insane.
You can tsc on the code and then ship that git hash if it passes. You don't need to run it every single time the code executes, nothing of value is gained, because nothing has changed.
This is not my experience at all. In my experience, it's often quite useful being able to run code that doesn't fully type-check, as long as I do make sure everything's correct by the time I commit it. For example, I might be refactoring a module with some tests, and make a change that breaks the tests and some code in some other module. At this point, I often go in this order:
1. See that the tests aren't type checking correctly (usually for an obvious reason like adding an extra parameter or something).
2. Fix the tests using the type hints.
3. Run the tests to make sure my refactoring made sense and didn't break anything unexpected at runtime.
4. Fix all the uses in other modules.
Step 3 requires me to be able to run code that doesn't type-check correctly, and that's a useful feature.
There's also similar cases where I want to see how something looks in the UI even if it's not properly hooked up yet and causing type errors - I can check that part of the UI works and that it throws the correct runtime error (equivalent to whatever error typescript has). I've also had cases where I've cast things to `unknown` because I don't want to figure out the type just yet, and then written an implementation that is filled with typescript errors but will work at runtime as a mini proof of concept, only to later go back and get the types right.
I shall think you're underestimating how important fast cycle times are. When I'm developing, I normally have my linter, tsc, the dev server (tsx or vite), and the test runner all running simultaneously in watch mode. At any one point, I'm probably only interested in the output from one of these tools (the type checker until the types are all correct, then maybe the test runner until everything's green there). But if I run all of them at once, then they all run optimistically, and the tool I'm interested in is more likely to give me immediate feedback. That's really useful! Even with the new 10x typescript compiler, I'd still rather my tests start running immediately rather than waiting for another process to start and finish before they get going.
TypeScript never promised improving safety, maybe it’s a common misconception. But TypeScript has no runtime mode or information. You were always at the mercy of running and not ignoring the typechecker. Nothing stopped you from running ts-node or tsx on code with egregious type errors. TypeScript is more like a linter in that regard.
I think it's not fair to say that Typescript isn't about improving safety, just that the mechanism isn't the same as with other languages. Typescript had always allowed you to ignore the type checker (in fact, the default configuration will always attempt to emit compiled Javascript, even if the source Typescript has type errors). But if you run the type checker on every commit (via e.g. CI or a precommit hook), then you can be sure that the code you release is correctly typed, which will not guarantee it is safe, but makes it more likely.
I agree that it's better to think of Typescript as a linter that needs specialised annotations to work, rather than a type system like you might find in Java or Rust.
What, pray tell, would be the point of putting all that type information in there, and then have it checked (via tsc), if not for the sake of safety? What other use would this have in your opinion?
No, I don't think there really is. But to be execute is even more clear that it's just... executing the code, whereas I could maybe understand someone being confused that run implied some level of type checking.
This is misleading. It is not transpiling TS in JS, it is transpiling a subset of TS into JS. If my normal TS code can not be "executed" by Node, then it is not executing TS per definition but something else. If you are good with Node supporting and "executing" only a subset of TS and lacking useful features, that's fine. But don't tell people it is executing TypeScript. That's like me saying my rudimentary C++ compiler supports C++ while in reality only supporting 50%. People would be pissed if they figure it out once they try to run it on their codebase.
There is always a compile step (JS -> Bytecode -> Machine code). The question is only if it is visible to you or not. They could have made it totally transparent to you by fully support TS including type checking under the hood including support full TS and not this subset of it, but decided not to do so. There is nothing inherently great to have less compile steps if you are not even aware of it. See v8 how many compile and optimizations steps they have - You don't care, because you don't see it. The only problem of TS is, you will always be able to see it because of it being slow.
I think running TS without type checks is almost entirely pointless.
The point is I don't have to deal with the index.js blob that gets produced by running the compile step myself. Worse yet the source maps. It's significantly less steps so pretty helpful I'd say.
I'm using tsx for a project to achieve the same effect. As you said, it saves you from having to set up a build/transpilation step, which is very useful for development. Tsx has a --watch feature built in as well, which allows me to run a server from the typescript source files and automatically restart on changes. Maybe with nodemon and this new node improvement this can now done without tsx.
To check types at runtime (if that can even be done in a useful way?) it would have to be built into v8, and I suppose that would be a whole rewrite.
Yeah agreed - saying "node can execute typescript files" is a bit misleading. More accurate would be "node can find-and-replace type information with spaces from .ts files and try and executing them as if they were plain JavaScript"
I suspect this would only handle the most rudimentary and basic typescript files. Once you start using the type system more extensively I suspect this will blow-up in your face.
It's kinda a shame. What a missed opportunity to do it properly (rather than relying on third party plugins etc)
Edit: if you are just using typescript for type checking at build time (i.e. the most basic rudimentary typescript files) the sure fine this may help you. But typescript also generates JavaScript code for missing features e.g. proper class access modifiers, generics, interfaces, type aliases, enums, decorators etc etc. typescript generates JS code to handle all that, so you're going to have a bad time if node just replaces it with the space character at run time.
Just to give context here, NodeJS doesnt support enums, namespaces and class parameter properties. All of these have been described as regrets by Anders Hejsberg, and none of them prevent advanced use of the type system at all.
Yes, they regret them because they hinder adoptions. Why? Because nobody chose to add TSC with all features in their runtime because TSC is extremely slow.
They know they can skyrocket adoption by limiting the language. That's the reason they regret it. This is just a strategy to increase adoption. Not because they are bad features. They are in fact very useful, and you should not stop using them just because your favorite runtime decided to go the easy way and only supporting a subset of TS by stripping types. You should rather switch the runtime instead of compromising your codebase.
TypeScript 5.8 added a configuration option[1], where the compiler emits errors when using language features that result in code generation (e.g. enums). It's expected that people wanting to run TypeScript through "erase-only" transpilers will use this option.
Of course, everyone else is free to use enums, decorators, class parameters, etc., but for quick prototyping or writing simple scripts in TypeScript, Bun has been good enough for me, and I assume Node will be "good enough" as well.
> node can find-and-replace type information with spaces from .ts files and try and executing them as if they were plain JavaScript
That’s what all the other tools like ts-node and tsx do already.
I’m not sure what more are you expecting to do?
Typescript is build time type checked, there is no runtime component to TypeScript. If you want type checking you run tsc.
I think this is a great step in the right direction by node. It will save transpiration on the server and improve stack traves and whatnot.
> Once you start using the type system more extensively I suspect this will blow-up in your face.
I don’t see why. There isn’t any more runtime information in “complex”
TypeSceipt types than in simple ones. It’s all build time - see above.
> What a missed opportunity to do it properly
Please explain in more detail what “doing it properly” means to you. Including the typechecker? If so that wouldn’t make sense - they would be competing with TypeScript itself, they shouldn’t, all the “third party plugins” rely on tsc for type checking.
> I think this is a great step in the right direction by node
I think it's the opposite. It will be a net negative, since people will now run TS by default without type checking. Wasting so much time chasing weird runtime errors - just to end up running the full blown TSC type checking again. They will also write very different TS now, trying to workaround the limitation and arguably very useful features like Enums, constructor properties, etc. This has real negative effects on your codebase if you rely on these, just because Node chose to support only a subset.
It's interesting to see the strategy now and to see people even gaslighting people into believing no type checks and less features is a good thing. All just because of one root cause - TSC being extremely slow.
I have been using this feature to remove the transpilation step during development for a rather large monorepo that makes extensive use of very complex types and haven’t noticed any errors whatsoever at runtime.
You’re downplaying this quite a bit. Node being able to execute TS files slashes a lot of tooling in half, especially during development when you want to modify files and retry in quick succession.
Besides, I’m not so sure this cannot be expanded in the future to adopt validation features before stripping the type information. For now it solves some major pain points for a lot of people.
It also exposes a function which does type stripping (as `import { stripTypeScriptTypes } from 'node:module'`).
This lets you build simple web apps (i.e., those with no frontend dependencies) as pure TypeScript, including the frontend, by stripping the types out from your frontend scripts as you serve them: https://github.com/bakkot/buildless-ts-webapp
It's not able to execute TypeScript, but a subset of it. The claim in the title is misleading if not totally wrong.
This will unfortunately drive people towards using TS only as a linter, and not use its powerful features that are inherently impossible to implement with just type stripping.
I guess decorators. Which are quite powerful but I’ve never seen them used outside of libraries/frameworks that use them (angular, certain ORMs, nestjs?)
As a personal taste I don’t really like decorators that much, but it’s true that nestjs projects (which is probably a majority of new backend TS projects) will not gain anything from this release. Then again, you always set nestjs up with a template anyway that has all of the tooling and building baked in. So whatevs.
It’s still a huge huge win, and I finally have hope for typescript-ifying some horrible legacy node apps at work!!
That is the real reason we get a less feature-rich TypeScript in the future and Node not supporting full TypeScript. Because they want to be supported by browser.
Contrary to the popular trend, I usually stick with Node and NPM for most of my projects. That said, I’ve run into plenty of headaches with CommonJS vs ESM quirks. Sharing code between frontend and backend (via shared libraries) still feels messy because of those differences. In one project I actually had to switch to Bun as the runtime, since Node kept failing at runtime, and strangely enough, Bun just worked without issues.
Anecdotally Ive noticed a lot of packages failing to build when updating from node 20 to 22.18.0 that weren't failing with earlier node 22 versions. .18 unflagged typescript support.
These are packages using ts-node or tsx to run typescript in node, and with node 22.18 they seem to be using nodes native typescript support instead, and failing due to its limited feature set, or subtly different module resolution.
Its worth being clear that it isn't capable of actually executing TypeScript; it executes the "non-emitting" subset of the TypeScript language. If your app uses `enum`, among a couple other features, it wont work.
The benefit is one fewer step between Intellisense-enhanced development (which speeds things up with autocompletion and catches a lot of issues at design time already) and running the code, same as any linter.
It performs no type checking, and you don't need to load the compiler to compile. Tsc is a heavy package and having Node do this for you means much faster startup.
I've been using this for helper scripts, where each script is its own entry point, to assist with various maintenance tasks in frontend projects. Much easier to clone the project and run `./scripts/frobnicate` than faff around with tsc. Previously they would have been written in pure JS or just bash.
It's faster and a good bit more convenient in greenfield, in my experience. Less safe in that you do still need a type checker, but nothing about Node's stripping is at all meant for more than experimental use anyway so that's fine.
Is there any movement in the node world for the runtime to be able to ascertain types? Obviously nodejs doesn't do this, but does Bun or Deno or are there plans for any of this in the future?
This has nothing to do with the "node world". Such an enormous feature would have to go into ECMAScript. Which is very, very unlikely to ever happen, they may as well design a new language. All those runtimes implement that spec. Expecting them to write an extremely complex new feature that is easily more complicated than everything already implemented (especially with backwards compatibility, and given that the language was not designed for this) would be a bit much.
TypeScript is for compile time checking of a language that was not designed to have them. Runtime types have very different requirements! It has to be in the language from the early design phase, otherwise it will just be a hack with many conditions, restrictions and holes.
TS Types are only partially a description of the underlying types in the code, a very big part instead is that it provides guard rails that prevent you from using a lot of perfectly fine and valid JS code that would however be incompatible with type guarantees. You pay the price of using only a part of the large space of JS code possibilities for guarantees. If you were to put that into the runtime you would end up with two different versions of the language. If you still want to support the full JS you would end with two runtimes in one (or one that has so many branches and conditions that maintaining that runtime is a real beast).
Now of course, this would only add type syntax to the language, not true processing: there's nothing in the spec about actually handling them. Still, it's a step in that direction, so I wouldn't say "very unlikely to ever happen" ... "still a long ways off (if ever)" would be more accurate.
Can't be too hard imo. Primitives can contain an extra metadata field for the types defined in the code. This doesn't really interfere with the runtime and will be backwards compatible. The runtime of course still doesn't actually have to do any type checking, it's just forwarding the type information on a new metadata field so it's not in any way interrupting the core flow of the runtime logic. As a result you can still have the wrong type tagged onto a primitive just like TS has it currently.
Only downside I see is that It can slow down the code as the runtime now has to evaluate type level functions in order to know what to place in the metadata.
But you're right in the sense that it has to go into the core ECMA specification rather then being a node project.
i don’t think you’ll see this at the typescript level, and you won’t see anything like this that compiles to javascript. specifically, compiling typescript to javascript with runtime checks would not actually be very useful.
typescript is pretty ambiguous about a lot of the things that would need explicit definition for runtime safety, and anyways we already have tools for that - it’s called zod.
and comprehensive checks would incur a significant runtime penalty, unless they were restricted to external interfaces, which is what you’re really concerned about. we already have tools for that - protobuf, swagger, etc.
anything else is sharing a runtime with you. so either it’s in your ide, and you just don’t write shitty code; or you’re trapped in some kind of demonic javascript prisoner’s dilemma, and you are mutable.
so typescript is basically ‘good enough’ for developers.
thinking forward anyway, and assuming you’re really willing to share a runtime with a stranger…
node doesn’t really operate in that kind of context, but maybe browser code does. i could imagine a framework based on web components, workers, and maybe iframes, taking advantage of message boundaries to enhance analysis and conceal code generation. it’s not that much better than typescript.
but if you want efficient runtime checks, and you want to leverage static analysis and strong module boundaries to scope the type-checking codegen, and you probably need additional syntax, you might as well target wasm.
Yeah, but Zod and all of the runtime schema libraries all kind of add verbosity to the type system compared to say something like Typia[0] which AOT compiles the type checks (and ends up being way more elegant).
Caveat is that there are some restrictions with the compiler and some possible footguns (duplicated declarations bloating code).
I believe it would be too hard to keep up with pace of TypeScript development. We should probably at some point formally define the system and allow for alternative implementations outside of the control of Microsoft.
Express is still popular, but a lot projects these days use a full-stack framework like Next.js, SvelteKit, etc.
Fastify, NestJS (bleh), Koa, Hono are the modern replacements for express, none of them have caught on as a standard though. My personal favorite for small projects is Polka (https://github.com/lukeed/polka), when I'm not using Go instead.
IMHO the only reason you are using JS in the backend is because of some meta framework, otherwise is not worth. So at least for Nuxt is nitro, not sure for SvelteKit or the other React meta frameworks.
Next is where it's at these days in my opinion. You get a full-featured client-side React framework (the only one that supports modern React SSG), and then on top of it you get a better-organized approach to doing everything you can do with Express.
And do mean everything: I run an entire Postrgraphile server through Next (and you can easily do the sme with Supabase or a similar tool)!
For one I do not want to run my startup at the mercy of VC funded tech. Node.js is open source and maintained by a foundation, it will not "run out of funds" or be abandoned if there is no profitability in the near future.
Yeah, but it's not a big bet. Deno can do it, Bun can do it, if they die a tragic VC-fueled death then somebody else (maybe Node) can do it. Using Bun to me is just like using a microwave oven in 1980 — there weren't a lot of microwavable convenience foods yet, but you could sure heat up some leftovers more conveniently and quickly.
Runtime type assertion at the edges is mostly solved through `zod` and tools like `ts-rest` and `trpc` makes it so much easier to do full-stack Typescript these days.