tsx VS esbuild

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._

During my search for deploying Lambdas via GitHub actions, I came across a tutorial that utilized ncc for converting TypeScript and bundling. While ncc is effective, I discovered esbuild, which proved to be significantly faster and perfectly suited to my requirements.

The advent of esbuild, the native support for ES Modules in browsers, the widespread adoption of import map, the emergence of tools like Native Federation, and the Nx ecosystem all combine to forge a flexible and well-maintained Micro Frontend Architecture.

EsBuild is a relatively new, blazing-fast JavaScript bundler and minifier. It stands out for its high performance, significantly speeding up the build process in development pipelines.

Unlike Webpack, the Vite DevServer only compiles files when they are requested. It leverages ES module imports, which allow JS files to import other files without needing to bundle them together during development. When one file changes, only that file needs to be re-compiled, and the rest can remain unchanged. Project files are compiled with Rollup.js. Third-party dependencies in node_modules are pre-compiled using the ultra-fast esbuild bundler for maximum speed, and they are cached until the dependency version changes. Vite also provides a client script for hot module reloading.

Use esbuild to build the React code into a form executable on both the server and client sides.

The functions will bundle using esbuild. For that, it is required to install esbuild globally:

TSX is the newest and most improved version of our ts-node, using ESBuild to transpile TS files to JS very quickly. The most interesting part is that TSX was developed to be a complete replacement for Node, so you can actually use TSX as a TypeScript REPL, if you install it globally with npm i -g tsx, just run tsx in your terminal and you can write TSX natively. But what's even cooler is that you can load TSX for all TypeScript files using --loader tsx when you run your file. For example, let's say we have this file called index.ts:

esbuild plus Vite is out of developer preview and enabled by default, yielding 67%, 87%, 80% speed improvements for build time, hybrid build time and hybrid serve time respectively.

Bundling with esbuild

Besides Webpack, there are many other popular web bundlers available, such as Parcel, Esbuild, Rollup, and more. They all have their own unique features and strengths, and you should make your decision based on the needs and requirements of your specific project. Please refer to their official websites for details.