🔍 Search Terms

--strip-types

✅ Viability Checklist

• This wouldn't be a breaking change in existing TypeScript/JavaScript code
• This wouldn't change the runtime behavior of existing JavaScript code
• This could be implemented without emitting different JS based on the types of the expressions
• This isn't a runtime feature (e.g. library functionality, non-ECMAScript syntax with JavaScript output, new syntax sugar for JS, etc.)
• This isn't a request to add a new utility type: https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/No-New-Utility-Types
• This feature would agree with the rest of our Design Goals: https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/TypeScript-Design-Goals

⭐ Suggestion

Node.js has introduced an experimental flag that allows type annotations to be stripped. However, since Node.js only erases inline types, all TypeScript features that involve replacing TypeScript syntax with new JavaScript syntax will fail as described in the Node.js docs. The following features are listed in the docs as the most important features not supported:

• Enum
• experimentalDecorators
• namespaces
• parameter properties

Would it be possible to introduce a single flag in tsconfig that tells the compiler in one fell swoop that all these features should not be enabled to ensure compatibility with Node.js --strip-types?

📃 Motivating Example

If there was such a configuration option, you could easily ensure that the code you write always contains only standard JavaScript + type annotations that can be executed by Node.js without installing any additional packages.

💻 Use Cases

Finding the correct configuration of tsconfig for different Node.js projects is already relatively complicated. A simplified configuration that allows you to author compliant Typescript code that works smoothly with Node.js new out-of-the-box ts support via the --strip-types flag would be a great help.