tsx VS bun

I really enjoy frontend/node/typescript development. I roll my eyes whenever the HN-types complain about CSS or frontend development being a hellhole. Mostly the comments I see seem ignorant or impatient ("Why doesn't this thing work without be bothering to learn it?")

However, the intersection of typescript, nodejs, and ES modules is consistently the most frustrating experience I ever have. Trying to figure out which magic incantation of tsconfig/esbuild/tsc/node options will let me just write code and run it is a fools errand. You might figure something out, and then you try to use Jest and then you descend into madness again.

The biggest tip I can give people is to ditch ts-node and just use (the awkwardly named) tsx https://github.com/privatenumber/tsx, which pretty much just "mostly works" for running Typescript during dev for node.

The problem mostly seems to stem for all the stakeholders being pretty dogmatic to whatever their goals are, rather than the pragmatic option of just meeting people where they are. I really wish the Node, Typescript, Deno/Bun, and maybe some bundler people would come together and figure out how to make this easier for people.

If your TypeORM entity is written in TypeScript, you have to run ERDIA using ts-node or tsx as follows.

Want to import a package / file conveniently from esm.sh or unpkg or directly from a GitHub repo for a one-off script (for example). To do this I created a custom ESBuild plugin to handle HTTP imports - that worked for ,js files. To support running both ESM and CJS, I use tsx.

I prefer tsx honestly. Nodemon will detect that your using TypeScript and switch from node to ts-node but tsx is a no config necessary version of ts-node that also runs faster. Of course you can configure ts-node to use swc to be faster but then you're playing with config files to get things working.

I highly recommend you give this a shot over ts-node

Dude I just worked on a PoC a few hours ago. What I did was use ReactDOM's renderToStaticMarkup and tsx to execute the script so I get jsx transpilation on the fly.

I’ve been trying to adopt Deno into new projects, but I find Node through tsx good enough.

try tsx. it has support for watch mode and works great with esm module projects.

This is the answer: https://github.com/esbuild-kit/tsx

Have a look at https://github.com/esbuild-kit/tsx

_tsx is a CLI command (alternative to node) for seamlessly running TypeScript & ESM, in both commonjs & module package types.

It's powered by esbuild so it's insanely fast._

It has a decent compatibility with both Jest and Vitest's APIs (you can track progress here so you can use it as almost a drop-in replacement for either. Just as Node's, it has describe/it, mock, test and others, but with the expect syntax (which I find more readable). For example:

In this third and final article in the series on HTML Streaming, we will explore the practical implementation of the Diff DOM Streaming library in web browsing. This approach will allow any website using web components to retain its state during browsing. We will discuss in detail how to achieve this step by step using VanillaJS and Bun.

At Node Conference 2023, Jarred Sumner (creator of Bun) showed a demo of server components in Bun, so there is at least partial support in that ecosystem. The Bun repo provides bun-plugin-server-components as the official plugin for server components. And while I haven’t looked at it in-depth, Marz claims to be a “React Server Components Framework for Bun”.

Continuously evolving, Bun is currently optimized for MacOS and Linux, with ongoing efforts towards Windows compatibility. Tailored for resource-constrained environments like serverless functions, it emerges as an ideal solution. The Bun team is committed to achieving comprehensive Node.js compatibility and seamless integration with prevalent frameworks. For those intrigued by Bun's potential and want to give it a try, more information is available on its website at https://bun.sh/.

Let’s say you are interested in learning more about Bun and probably give it a try. Bun has a website, where you can learn more about Bun and its features (including all the benchmark data captured in this issue), and here is the link.

Looks like it, it seems the 2% are mostly odd platform specific issues that the authors' did not deem very important (my assumption for the release happening anyway). AFAIK this[1] PR tries to fix them.

[1]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/9729

Bun has a solution for it. First of all, it already has a list of trusted dependencies. For them, Bun will execute all necessary scripts by default. Otherwise, you can add it to trustedDependecies in your package.json file. In Bun community usage of trustedDependencies is a hot topic. There are several suggestions on how to improve it.

Install Node.js (or Bun, or Deno, or whatever JS runtime you prefer) if it's not there

I think maybe I was unclear. I'm talking about writing libraries that abstract across these differences and provide a single API, as sibling describes. I already know it's possible. I made a simple filesystem abstraction here[0] and a very simple HTTP library that uses it here[1]. They both work in Node/Deno and the browser. Unfortunately I ran into issues with Bun's slice implementation[2]. But I suspect there's a much better way of detecting and using the different backends.

[0]: https://github.com/waygate-io/fs-js

[1]: https://github.com/waygate-io/http-js

[2]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/7057