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Comment by demurgos | Hacker News Reader

I always found it easier to avoid `ts-node` as it introduced a bunch of small compat issues.

Since TS 4.5 and their support for `.mts`, I finally settled on just chaining `tsc --build && node ./build/main.mjs`.

I generally agree with your statement, but have found ts-node incredibly valuable especially when developing servers or CLIs where I want to start/restart the process many times without a build step every time.

Node has a built in watch mode and so does tsc. So if you start both you should get what you want.

or: `tsc --build --watch` and then just have another terminal to run.

Yes, TS now fully supports ESM so the watch mode works great. I'm not used to using it when working in Node, but other people I work with use it all the time.

And for development?

With TS, I get type checking in the IDE; I don't need to rebuild every few seconds.

When I actually need to build and test, it's very fast (<2 seconds). I use Yarn workspaces/subprojects and TypeScript references with incremental builds so it's not really an issue.

Here is the `package.json` [0] for a serialization lib I did, you can check the `scripts` section: it's very minimal and I'm quite happy with it. I'm an old Gulp maintainer, so for a long time I had heavy Gulp config with a lot of processing. Over the years I could get rid of it. ESM was the last thing holding me back; and now I'm so happy that I can just use a few simple commands.

[0]: https://github.com/demurgos/kryo/blob/master/packages/kryo/p...

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