Node can run TypeScript (sort of)

July 30, 2024 By Mark Otto 0

Node.js Weekly

Node.js Adds Experimental Support for TypeScript — In this pull request, Node merged an experimental ability to transpile TypeScript into JavaScript, ultimately letting Node directly ‘run TypeScript’. However, no type checking is performed and, as Matt Pocock explains, experimental and TypeScript-only features are a no-no. Perhaps think of it as less ‘running TypeScript’ and more ‘able to tolerate most of TypeScript’?

Sarah Gooding (Socket)

Node v20.16.0 (LTS) Released — If the recent bugs in the ‘Latest’ release branch have put you off, the trusty LTS releases are for you. A small-ish release, but Node 20 gains process.getBuiltinModule and Blob#bytes.

Marco Ippolito

😍 Regarding last week’s issues with v20.5.0, the Node team has improved its testing processes to help avoid such problems in the future. No story to link to; I just follow the Node team’s livestreams and they were talking about it. 🙂

Benchmarking AWS Lambda Cold Starts Across JavaScript Runtimes — It’s from the Deno team so it may not surprise you that Deno was found to be fastest, but they share their methodology and results for Deno, Node, Bun and AWS’s managed Node runtime and, frankly, Node mostly did very well too.

Zinkovsky and Jiang (Deno)

📄 Working with PostgreSQL’s Row Level Security in Node.js Kristian Dupont

📄 Highlights from Git 2.46 Taylor Blau (GitHub)

🛠 Code & Tools

PythonMonkey: Embed a JavaScript Engine into the Python VM — If you need to use Python but also want to run JS, this gives you a way to do it with Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey engine. It’s not V8 or Node based, but supports the Node.js and NPM-compatible CommonJS module system.

Distributive Corp.