You don't need a bundler, just a type stripper. And yeah you need a middleware to perform the type stripping, the server won't do it automatically, but it's like 10 lines of backend code. The basic flow would be something like:

1. Browser requests /js/foo.js

2. Server middleware checks if /js/foo.ts exists

3. If yes, server middleware strips types from the file before returning it

In golang I use the go package github.com/evanw/esbuild[1] to do type stripping on the fly. The middleware looks like this:

``` return esbuild.Transform(string(fileBytes), esbuild.TransformOptions{ Loader: esbuild.LoaderTS, Format: esbuild.FormatESModule, }) ```

It only takes a few microseconds and I don't need any bundlers or tsc or anything like that. Everything on my frontend is 100% vanilla TS; I make changes directly to TS and then hit refresh in my browser and the changes are reflected instantly without needing a bundler or even node/npm for that matter. Note: for this setup to work, your front end TS has to use ES modules import/export which browsers natively support. If you try to use CommonJS or something like that, you would start needing a bundler again because browsers can't resolve "require" statements.

In node it should be even easier than Go because Node added native type stripping starting with v22[2]

But even on older versions of Node, a type stripping middleware would still be very easy to implement[3][4].

[1] https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/evanw/esbuild

[2] https://nodejs.org/api/module.html#modulestriptypescripttype...

[3] https://github.com/bloomberg/ts-blank-space

[4] https://esbuild.github.io/api/#js-async