Transformer Plugin or Compiler API

[M-jerez]

Current ecosistem extensively relies in the compiler API, vue, vite, angular, even react is now optimising reactivity as well as many other tools for runtypes like typia, deepkit and my ion rpc based framework mion

There was a proposal for a transformers plugin but has been now removed now. microsoft/TypeScript#54276 (comment)

My understanding is that now the js interaction and API is way more complicated as we have to bind JS and Go, so assuming this will be implemented last if so.

So opening this Issue to track the progress or at least heard some feedback from the Typescript team about the future of this or should those tooling be looking into migrating to go as well ?

[jakebailey]

Go is a statically compiled language without good plugin support; porting your code to Go is unfortunately not going to be a solution that works when our package contains a precompiled binary. So, any solution will certainly not involve that.

[baileympearson]

I think closing this issue as "completed" is premature. I agree that the first priority of the tsgo project should be feature parity between tsc and other core development tools (i.e., VSCode editor support, etc). This will support the majority of the community in the transition between the JS tsc and Go tsc. But there is a portion of the community that makes use of the compiler API and has expressed interest in the hypothetical plugin API. Closing this issue as "completed" leaves this portion of the community hanging. How are these projects supposed to migrate to tsgo?

Language isn't the issue here. I personally would be happy to use a TS compiler API from Go (frankly I'd probably prefer that to JS because then I'd get standalone executables out-of-the-box). I'd also imagine that if that is the solution that is offered to developers going forward, the community would just adapt and tools would be ported to Go.

There two related asks in this issue, which I guess could be separated into two separate issues:

1. add a programmatic compiler API
2. add a plugin API.

I understand that the TS team might not be considering working on these projects now but could we leave this ticket open to track interest and maybe prioritize this in the future? If not, could we have more clarity on why the TS team isn't planning on supporting these features and maybe some guidance on how the portions of the community that rely on these features should plan their eventual migrations?

[jakebailey]

Sorry, I meant to link #455, which is where discussion of the API is actually happening.

[jakebailey]

I also fat fingered the wrong button on my phone typing that earlier message out; I actually only meant to address the latter part of your comment about having to write Go!