10 Creating apps with TypeScript

In this chapter, I’ll give a few tips for using TypeScript to write apps.

10.1 Writing TypeScript apps for web browsers

Even with plain JavaScript, most projects use build tools for frontend web apps, for various reasons. Most of those build tools support TypeScript out of the box.

If you:

• Want to write a frontend app with TypeScript
• Have a particular frontend framework (or vanilla code) in mind
• Don’t want to think too much about tooling

Then you can take a look at the “Getting Started” page for Vite, a popular frontend build tool.

But there are many other build tools for JavaScript. These are some of them:

• Smaller scope: esbuild, Rolldown, Rollup, Rspack, tsup, Turbopack
• More comprehensive: Parcel, Rsbuild, Vite
• Monorepo tools: Nx, Turborepo

10.2 Writing TypeScript apps for server-side runtimes

• Node.js, Deno and Bun can all run TypeScript directly.
• By default, Node.js only supports type stripping, but experimental support for non-erasable features such as JSX and enums is available via --experimental-transform-types. Type stripping will remain the default.

Getting started with Node.js:

• My GitHub repository nodejs-type-stripping demonstrates how type stripping works in Node.js.
• “Publishing npm packages with TypeScript” (§9) explains how to transpile TypeScript for Node.js.