swc VS ts-node

First, we switched the default compiler for new projects from Babel to SWC (Speedy Web Compiler). SWC is dramatically faster than Babel and requires zero configuration. We’ll continue to support Babel in any project currently using it.

SWC

As the reference explains “**SWC** (Speedy Web Compiler) is an extensible Rust-based platform that can be used for both compilation and bundling. Using SWC with Nest CLI is a great and simple way to significantly speed up your development process.”

This is specifically about breaking the myth that performing expensive self-contained operations (e.g, parsing GraphQL) in a native extension (C, Rust, etc.) is always faster than the interpreted language.

The JS ecosystem has the same problem, people think rewriting everything in Rust will be a magic fix. In practice, there's always the problem highlighted in the post (transitioning is expensive, causes optimization bailouts), as well as the cost of actually getting the results back into Node-land. This is why SWC abandoned the JS API for writing plugins - constantly bouncing back and forth while traversing AST nodes was even slower than Babel (e.g https://github.com/swc-project/swc/issues/1392#issuecomment-...)

Why Speedy Web Compiler ?

FTA is a TypeScript static analysis tool built on the speedy foundations of swc. FTA is fast; capable of analyzing more than 150 files per second on typical hardware, it offers a powerful addition to your code quality toolkit.

Very cool! I'm curious, is this intended for dev tooling?

For example, I could see this (or something similar) being useful as the engine for a typescript language server that would be faster than the standard one

But if it's not aimed at 1:1 with tsc, would it be intended more for something like swc[1]?

Or what would you expect people to use this for, besides just being a cool project to learn from?

[1] https://github.com/swc-project/swc

This is... good news, but I still cannot fathom using the default Typescript compiler for regular development. Seriously, leave the type-checking to your IDE and CICD chain, and switch to using tsx (https://www.npmjs.com/package/tsx) or swc (https://swc.rs/) and you will _immediately_ notice the difference in speed and productivity.

I thought this was going to be a project like ts-node [1]

[1] https://github.com/TypeStrong/ts-node

The command specified in the app option uses ts-node by default, which is an execution engine for Node.js that allows you to run TypeScript code directly. The --prefer-ts-exts flag prevents ts-node from prioritizing precompiled .js files and will always import the TypeScript source code instead, if it is available. This is useful if you are also using tsc (the TypeScript compiler) alongside the app option. The bin/cdk.ts file is the entry point for our CDK app, which defines the main function that will be executed when the app is run.

If you want to write apps that run on Node.js I would suggest using Google’s TypeScript style guide. You can start using it by simply running npx gts init. I’d suggest that you start with this and run your apps using ts-node/ts-node-dev because it does not require an extra build step.

ts-node (“TypeScript execution and REPL for Node.js”)

Here is a relevant discussion and dev comment: https://github.com/TypeStrong/ts-node/issues/155

It does support ESM, with a --loader[1], but even with its SWC option it’s still significantly slower than the esbuild loader I’m working on. Unfortunately, esbuild isn’t totally compatible with tsc, so it’s not a drop-in replacement without plugins.

1: https://github.com/TypeStrong/ts-node#native-ecmascript-modu...

The process of compiling TypeScript source files into JavaScript code before executing them with Node.js can get a little tedious after a while, especially during development. You can eliminate the intermediate steps before running the program through the ts-node CLI to execute .ts files directly. Go ahead and install the ts-node package using the command below:

I tried suggested solution by https://github.com/TypeStrong/ts-node/issues/1007 but this causes problem with NestJS decorators: