TypeScript on Steroids

So if TypeScript is JavaScript on Steroids, this project is, well you get the idea...

No really what is this?

In short this provides, ts-node + tspoon in one executable but it is so much more.

TypeScript is awesome however it does lack some features from more established programming languages. Reflection is one such feature that I am always wishing was more powerful. This is not so much a TypeScript issue, it's more to do with the fact that TypeScript is just JavaScript and Js is very poor in this area.

With tspoon we can effectively extend the TypeScript language to support some of these concepts. For example automatically applying a @decorator to every class so that design time meta data is output by the TypeScript transpiler.

But now we have non portable TypeScript source code. This project aims to solve this problem by making tspoon vistors shareable between TypeScript code bases.

Reflection vs Transpilation

Intially I started this project with the idea of sharing my existing tspoon vistors that make reflection more powerful in TypeScript.

But then I got thinking that there are situations that instead of using a reflective model to build some dynamic object at run time. Perhaps we can get the same end result by simply applying more transpilations.

See this example:

import 'reflect-metadata';
import * as commander from 'commander';
import { paramCase } from 'change-case';

// This class represents our commander cli application.
class Foo
{
    public fooBar(someValue: string)
    {
        console.log('fooBar says: ' + someValue);
    }
    
    public barFoo()
    {
        console.log('Hello from barFoo');
    }
    
    public barFooQuz()
    {
        console.log('Hello from barFooQuz');
    }
}

// This code uses reflection to configure commander for us.
let foo = new Foo;
for (let name of Object.getOwnPropertyNames(Object.getPrototypeOf(foo)))
{
    let method = foo[name];
    
    // Ignore the constructor
    if (!(method instanceof Function) || method === Foo) continue;
    
    commander
    .command(paramCase(name).replace('-', ':'))
    //.description( TODO: We could use a decorator to provide this. )
    .action(method);
}

commander.parse(process.argv);

So using some imagination, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to see how one might transpile the typescript class directly into commander calls.

Thinking about this concept further one might end up with TypeScript packages, such as an Inversion of Control container, that implement some of their logic at runtime as well as at transpilation time through tspoon vistors.