Node.js is able to execute TypeScript files without additional configuration
nodejs.org442 points by steren 4 days ago
442 points by steren 4 days ago
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.
Interesting. I haven't looked hard at .Net despite some advocacy from past colleagues. Perhaps I should.
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.
Eh the focus on OOP is my main issue with it. It’s not my style in that sense.
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.
It's possible, but it can be weird and difficult: https://nodejs.org/docs/latest-v17.x/api/esm.html#esm_common...
Thankfully, actively-maintained CommonJS-only packages are quite rare by this point (in my experience).
> our downstream NPM consumers wouldn't be able to consume EJS
Node.js 20.17 and later supports loading ESM using `require()`: https://nodejs.org/api/modules.html#loading-ecmascript-modul...
The next version of Babel (currently in beta) is even going ESM-only.
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.
It's almost like Python 2 to Python 3 upgrade. Took a decade but everyone is finally happy.
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.
That's kind of the whole history of NodeJS, dragged-forward kicking and screaming right from the 0.x and IO days!
Deno first and then Bun. Node should just pass the flag at this point, they just do things to catch up.
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.
You mean TypeScript. TypeScript is finally usable by default.
I mean Node. I find writing Node in JS intolerable.
ESM, --watch, and TS syntax support is the combo that makes it all good!
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.
It's still probably better to use Bun.
Deno 2 is (arguably) just as compelling.
You're being downmodded for not providing any supporting arguments, but there's some compelling protection for malicious modules in these other JS implementations.
Am I? My comment was 7 words suggesting consideration for Deno 2, responding to a 7-word comment suggesting to use Bun.
It was a collective you, applying to the parent post as well.
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.
does it have a go fmt / lint command yet?
npx prettierI 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.
does that require a config?
depends, will you keep finding pendatic faults after any answer?
Having a typo in "pendantic" is a masterstroke
> "pendantic"
Genius!
One more time and it's pentadic. But imagine someone finding a way to bikeshed anti-bikeshedding tools. "Take with food."
No, it has good defaults. See also: https://prettier.io/docs/option-philosophy
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.