20 posts tagged with "ts-loader"

"It works on my machine" is an old joke. "It works on my Mac but fails on Windows CI" is a less funny version of the same joke, and one I've been living with while porting ts-loader to TypeScript 7. It gets less funny again when an AI agent is doing the porting, and the only way it can find out what went wrong on Windows is for me to copy and paste CI logs into the chat.

This post is about a small GitHub Actions workflow that removed me from that loop: a "test probe" that runs a targeted subset of tests, on demand, on Ubuntu, macOS and / or Windows, and which an agent can trigger and read for itself.

TypeScript is now the most popular programming language. Incredible. I was an early adopter back in 2012 and have since worked on a number of open source projects in the TypeScript ecosystem.

One of them is ts-loader, which integrates TypeScript the language with webpack; which is used to build web applications. You might be surprised to know ts-loader has 54 million downloads a month. I know I am. I'll be honest - I'm using Vite far more than I use webpack these days, but there are still a lot of people using webpack and ts-loader. And I intend to continue to support them.

Just lately, TypeScript was ported from being written in TypeScript to being written in Go. The reason being for performance - make TypeScript tooling 10x faster. TypeScript 7 is written in Go.

This has implications for ts-loader as it is built on APIs the TypeScript library exposed. But those APIs were not ported to TypeScript 7. New ones are being written, recently I heard that the first emit APIs had landed in the nightly version of TypeScript.

It's been a rough year. In March I was diagnosed with a serious illness. I've written about my diagnosis on my personal blog and I won't repeat what I said there here. But the TL;DR is this: I was told that without treatment things looked bleak. Happily, there was a follow up sentence; there is treatment and I am now having it. Whilst nothing is guaranteed, the doctors have used phrases like "cautious optimism". Time will tell what happens, but I am hopeful that I will be around for a while yet.

However, this has made me think about the future of the open source projects I maintain. If I cannot maintain them anymore, what happens? That's what the title of this blog post means; what, or who, is the DR (that's Disaster Recovery not Daniel Rosenwasser) for my open source projects? Maybe there's a better term than "Disaster Recovery". Having worked on various systems over the years, I've often been involved in disaster recovery planning for them. It always comes down to answering this question: what takes over when everything goes wrong?

Back in 2021 I published a post called ts-loader goes webpack 5; a big exciting post about how ts-loader was upgraded to directly support webpack 5, and drop support for webpack 4 in v9 of ts-loader.

For reasons which I'll get into shortly, as of v9.6.0, ts-loader now supports both webpack 5 (as it did already) and webpack 4. So if you're a webpack 4 user, you can now use ts-loader@9, rather than using ts-loader@8.

Builds can be made faster using tools like esbuild. However, if you're invested in webpack but would still like to take advantage of speedier builds, there is a way. This post takes us through using esbuild alongside webpack using esbuild-loader.

ts-loader has just released v9.0.0. This post goes through what this release is all about, and what it took to ship this version. For intrigue, it includes a brief scamper into my mental health along the way. Some upgrades go smoothly - this one had some hiccups. But we'll get into that.

Create React App is a fantastic way to get up and running building a web app with React. It also supports using TypeScript with React. Simply entering the following:

With TypeScript 3.4, a new behaviour landed and a magical new file type appeared; .tsbuildinfo

It's time for the first major version of fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin. It's been a long time coming :-)

It all started with a GitHub issue. Ernst Ammann reported:

So project references eh? They shipped with TypeScript 3. We've just shipped initial support for project references in ts-loader v5.2.0. All the hard work was done by the amazing Andrew Branch. In fact I'd recommend taking a gander at the PR. Yay Andrew!

webpack 4 has shipped!

The first webpack 4 beta dropped on Friday. Very exciting! Following hot on the heels of those announcements, I've some news to share too. Can you guess what it is?

2017 is drawing to a close, and it's been a big, big year in webpack-land. It's been a big year for ts-loader too. At the start of the year v1.3.3 was the latest version available, officially supporting webpack 1. (Old school!) We end the year with ts-loader sitting pretty at v3.2.0 and supporting webpack 2 and 3.

I'm quite proud of this: https://www.extrahop.com/company/blog/2017/extrahop-webpack-accelerating-build-times/

If you didn't know, I spend a good amount of my spare time hacking on open source software. You may not know what that is. I would describe OSS as software made with ❤ by people, for other people to use.

You are currently reading this on a platform that was built using OSS. It's all around you, every day. It's on your phone, on your computer, on your TV. It's everywhere.

It's my hobby, it's part of my work. This specifically was one of those tremendously rare occasions when I got paid directly to work on my hobby, with people much brighter than me. It was brilliant. I loved it; it was a privilege.

Here's to Open Source!

My name is John Reilly and I'm a VS Code addict. There I said it. I'm also a big fan of TypeScript and webpack. I've recently switched to using the awesome fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin to speed up my builds.

Have you ever wondered what happens behind the scenes of open source projects? One that I'm involved with is ts-loader; a TypeScript loader for webpack. Yesterday was an interesting day in the life of ts-loader and webpack; things unexpectedly broke. Oh and don't worry, they're fixed now.

Hands up, despite being one of the maintainers of ts-loader (a TypeScript loader for webpack) I have not been tracking webpack v2. My reasons? Well, I'm keen on cutting edge but bleeding edge is often not a ton of fun as dealing with regularly breaking changes is frustrating. I'm generally happy to wait for things to settle down a bit before leaping aboard. However, webpack 2 RC'd last week and so it's time to take a look!

That's how I was feeling on the morning of October 6th 2016. I'd been feeling that way for some time. The target of my concern? ts-loader. ts-loader is a loader for webpack; the module bundler. ts-loader allows you use TypeScript with webpack. I'd been a merry user of it for at least a year or so. But, at that point, all was not well in the land of ts-loader. Come with me and I'll tell you a story...

I wrote a while ago about how I was using some different tools in a current project: