I’m a huge TS fan and I agree. Deno is just running tsc for me it seems. So far I don’t see much advantage. It also potentially ties Deno to current trends. TS is pretty dang popular, but what if something else comes along and scoops it?
Note that Deno started out as Typescript runtime, it was it's tagline, they added the JavaScript later there.
> TS is pretty dang popular, but what if something else comes along and scoops it?
Earth is rather small, type inferencing dynamic language is really hard. There is simply no other language or team that has achived anything like TS. It's very unlikely that anyone else will do it for JS again. You can just look at amount of work in TS already.
Only thing that can "scoop it" is another language entirely taking off and leaving JS developers in the history. In that case the point becomes useless, it can happen to any runtime for any given language.
I read in a comment somewhere else in this post that you can just point deno at JS files to skip the TS compiler. I agree it's probably not a good idea to couple the Typescript version with the runner.
