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Comment by culi | Hacker News Reader

That is exactly how it works. Any IDE providing you intellisense is using the TypeScript language service. That's why this article is called "JSDoc is TypeScript". If you see a red squiggly because of your JSDoc comment, you are almost certainly already using TypeScript (without any .ts files)

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Ha! I see I elicited the copy/paste response I’ve seen elsewhere. The gp comment I was replying to implied a JSDoc only solution (“all in JSDoc”), but given the response, clearly they’re still relying on the TypeScript language service (aka lsp plugin) to achieve type checking inside their IDE.

Wishful thinking on my part that an alternative solution for JSDoc based type checking exists :)

Do you have a particular reason to care about the implementation details of your tooling's type checker?

Generally, no. Only in the case you had a requirement to exclusively use JavaScript as the programming language you might be in for an awkward time justifying that you added type checking to the project via the type checker component of TypeScript with JSDoc :)

Depends on your definition of "using" JavaScript. The main difference between common TypeScript and TS-based JSDoc is the need for an additional build step. Being able to ftp-upload your `.js` files and then be done with it is a remarkable advantage over Vite/Webpack/whatever in small to medium-sized projects. If editor based type support is sufficient to you (i.e. no headless checks), you won't need to install any TS packages at all, either. tsserver is still used in the background, but so are thousands of other binaries that keep your editor, OS and computer running, so I don't see that as an argument.

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