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Comment by lucasyvas | Hacker News Reader

Ecosystem is still worse, which is IMO all that matters at this point.

ts-node is good enough to stick to Node for now if you want TypeScript. I don't think the rest of Deno is that compelling, although I would probably switch to Deno once its Node compat is awesome since it is a more compelete package out of the box than Node is.

Deno's battle is that it is an incremental improvement, and competing JS runtimes is quickly become the new JS web framework meme alternative (Bun, Boa, Node, Deno)

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> Ecosystem is still worse, which is IMO all that matters at this point.

Matters for what ? Doing every type of app ? Yeah, that's blocker.

But it doesn't really matter. Every language ecosystem that succeeds starts off lacking things.

Personally I prefer starting with it early and be part of that ecosystem.

ts-node is great. Proper ESM support landed over the summer. All my new projects at work are module type now.

I use ts-node with the optional SWC compiler which works great with pretty darn fast startup times. SWC can handle TypeScript experimental decorators including emitting metadata, so not losing out on anything with it ATM.

+1 for the SWC compiler, been using it for some time and I love it.

    #! /usr/bin/env node -r @swc-node/register

...shebang is better than ts-node

I think esbuild is simpler than ts-node. We simply compile everything from TS to JS with esbuild every time we launch node (it takes less than 0.1 seconds)

It very well could be - I suppose that's more evidence to the point that working with Node is very doable these days even without built-in support for many tools.

See: https://github.com/lukeed/tsm which is built on esbuild.

Ah that looks cool. I'll definitely check that out at some point. Although our current node <-> esbuild integration is a ~6 line bash script, so there's not much pressure to change to another solution.

I still have nightmarish configuration problems when using ts-node. Deno has definitely made that easier for my personal projects at least.

"it is a more compelete package out of the box than Node"

How come?

Deno fmt, testing, capabilities, standalone binaries, built-in TS. Just a bit more modern and nice and saves a lot of setup you'd have to do with Node.

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