In this Hasty Treat, Scott and Wes talk about the differences between compilers and build tools in TypeScript.
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Show Notes
03:38 - What is a TypeScript compiler?
07:49 - Babel
- Transpiler
- It doesn’t do typechecking
- New JS features that aren’t in TypeScript yet
10:22 - SWC
13:03 - Deno
13:36 - Surcase
14:46 - ESBuild
- Compiles, but doesn’t do any type checking
- Fastest
17:39 - What about bundlers?
- Parcel
- Snowpack
- Webpack
- ESBuild
- When might you still need a bundler?
- To handle different types of files that are non-standard
- Like importing CSS and images
- Treeshaking
- Smaller bundle files
- Typescript can concatenate to a single file, or all .js files, but smaller / smarter bundles still need a tool for that
- Polyfills
- Typescript does convert to syntax, but will not polyfill features
- Something like Promise
- Syntax can be transpiled to old code
- Methods like allSettled aren’t
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