Great article! Babel is totally still useful, there are a lot of things babel can do over tsc, like literally anything. Until typescript has a plugin system where you can easily include extra transpilers and parsers, babel will always be the more flexible option. If anything I feel like since the typescript preset came out, the question should be "do we still need tsc?"
Pretty much my conclusion indeed, I don't see a scenario where using tsc for the transpiling phase is better now?
But it was not obvious at a first glance, as the reddit answers and my own interrogation shows. Maybe that's because as you said, at the beginning of TypeScript, Babel wasn't an easy option since the TS plugin didn't existed
Honestly, I view tsc as a "proof of concept" compiler at best - incapable of even linking an npm package, it has honestly never been of any real practical use on real projects in the real world.
It's useful for the language service and for type-checking with --noEmit and not much else.
It's kind of sad, really. The compiler itself is like a frustrating teaser - just enough to get someone trying out TS and get them interested, but not enough for them to actually do anything really useful at all.
It gets to the point of poignant, really - the fact that the Playground allows you to import from npm packages, but not actually run the code... I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
They ought to either retire it or at least add basic support for linking dependencies. 😕
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Great article! Babel is totally still useful, there are a lot of things babel can do over tsc, like literally anything. Until typescript has a plugin system where you can easily include extra transpilers and parsers, babel will always be the more flexible option. If anything I feel like since the typescript preset came out, the question should be "do we still need tsc?"
Thank you !
Pretty much my conclusion indeed, I don't see a scenario where using tsc for the transpiling phase is better now?
But it was not obvious at a first glance, as the reddit answers and my own interrogation shows. Maybe that's because as you said, at the beginning of TypeScript, Babel wasn't an easy option since the TS plugin didn't existed
Honestly, I view
tscas a "proof of concept" compiler at best - incapable of even linking an npm package, it has honestly never been of any real practical use on real projects in the real world.It's useful for the language service and for type-checking with
--noEmitand not much else.It's kind of sad, really. The compiler itself is like a frustrating teaser - just enough to get someone trying out TS and get them interested, but not enough for them to actually do anything really useful at all.
It gets to the point of poignant, really - the fact that the Playground allows you to import from npm packages, but not actually run the code... I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
They ought to either retire it or at least add basic support for linking dependencies. 😕