There aren't that many TS features that actually require transpiling unless you want to write bleeding edge JS, and that's still a factor without typescript.
> No build step is an appealing feature for some.
ts-node exists
My question is how do you reuse and test the JS doc signatures? Can I export comments? Will my tests fail if the types mismatch?
JSDoc comments can be checked with TSC and I get squiggly lines in VSCode. It's a major step in the right direction. Obviously tests work the same they always did, there is no runtime type checking just as there isn't in TS.
A recent example is a Chrome extension I wrote for the sake of proving out a feature.
Totally not interested in setting up a build system, dealing with dependencies, type safety, and so forth. I just want to write code and immediately see it run. Having JSDoc is nice to document more than just types, but type hints can be helpful.
> My question is how do you reuse and test the JS doc signatures? Can I export comments? Will my tests fail if the types mismatch?
You can import types now, at least with VS Code.
``` /* * @typedef {import('./types.js').MyType} MyType */ ```
Haven't found myself using it, though.
When using TypeScript to avoid using TypeScript, yeah. It's not valid JSDoc: https://github.com/jsdoc/jsdoc/issues/1645
You can use `tsc` to export the types defined in jsdoc and other projects that import your module will get all the intellisense and type checking as if it had been written in TypeScript.