What it do?

A simple wrapper of esbuild to run your script file.

Motivation

Writing TypeScript is fun, but executing them is not. tsc itself is just a transpiler, it does not support bundling nor executing.

Now ts-node comes in, it wraps TypeScript compiler and makes use of Node's require.extensions to run files, it works fine but does not fully support pure ESM (they will). Besides, invoking type system is also a waste of time when your files become more. Even if you turn-ed off type checking, reading files in node's single thread is also slow.

Now, with esbuild, you can bundle your script into one file and run it much faster.

$ esbuild-dev script.ts
# esbuild --bundle script.ts --outfile=node_modules/.esbuild-dev/script.ts.js
# node node_modules/.esbuild-dev/script.ts.js

That's it. Simple and naive.

Originally, I developed this tool to achieve zero *.js in some projects.

Alternatives

tsx

It uses Node's native require.extensions for commonjs and loaders for es modules to achieve similar behavior. There are pros and cons in compare it with mine:

First of all, we're using different functions in esbuild to transform your ts files to js. tsx uses transform, while I use build with bundle enabled.

	tsx (transform)	@hyrious/esbuild-dev (build)
Pros	Transforming is lighter than bundling, it may be faster Can totally run in memory, cache files are just for further speed up	Can use every esbuild build-only features, for example plugins Easy to debug because you can find the bundled js file in your disk
Cons	Hard to debug because cache files are minified and named in hash Cannot use plugins, but you can chain other node loaders to do similar	Cannot totally run in memory, it has to write the result to your disk Bundling can be slower when you have lots of files or slow plugins

Note that I also have a loader mode which is a simpler implementation in that it doesn't hack require.extensions and in most of the cases it is enough to do e.g. unit test with coverage report.