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Comment by kitsunesoba | Hacker News Reader

I've used `tsc --watch` as an almost-no-build-step way to write plain TypeScript with better structure (separate files, etc) for projects where dependencies aren't necessary, which works reasonably well with a few quirks, but I wish there were something more purpose-built for the task. TypeScript running natively in the browser would be amazing but I doubt that'll ever happen.

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I wonder how far fetched it would be to have just the syntax of Typescript on the browser without type-checking. We'd have to use tsc locally only for the typechecking, without the need of a build process, but that would be enough for me.

I know there's JSDoc but the normal syntax is so much better.

EDIT: Looks like there's a proposal: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-type-annotations

IIRC that's how the Flow type annotations worked, but of course it lost out to TypeScript.

Correct, but to be more precise, both Typescript and Flow allow for both JSDoc and the more common TS-like syntax.

The problem with build systems isn't the existence of a build step but the necessity of the build system and its configuration.

Typescript is baffling-ly complex to use compared to something like python.

> tsc build

What's complex about that?

To be fair, tsconfig.json has a ton of options, and you often can’t just use the defaults. It’s necessarily complex, unfortunately.

python runtime is great. bites back with the dependency versioning though

I use an in-browser typescript loader (no type checking, just stripping definitions -> ~10x faster than tsc), fast enough for most personal projects I do recently

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