rollup-plugin-fast-typescript

A plugin that uses esbuild, swc or Sucrase (you decide!) for blazing fast TypeScript transpilation.

• This plugin requires Rollup version 4.0.0 or higher.
• This package is ESM-only and can only be used from an ESM configuration file (either rollup.config.mjs or rollup.config.js with type="module" in package.json. See Rollup docs for more detail).

Features

• You choose which one of the three supported transpilers to use.
• Zero config: your project's tsconfig.json is all you need.
• Uses TypeScript API for full tsconfig.json compatibility:
  • tsconfig.json#extends:
    • Supports extending configs from npm packages, e.g., @tsconfig/base.
    • In watch mode, all files in the config chain are watched and trigger a rebuild if modified.
  • Full TypeScript-like module resolution, including compilerOptions#baseUrl, compilerOptions#paths, compilerOptions#rootDirs and even compilerOptions#moduleSuffixes!
• No hidden "magic" that happens behind your back.

Installation

Use your favorite package manager. Mine is npm.

You must also make sure that the transpiler you plan to use is installed - the plugin does not install it for you.

For esbuild:

npm install --save-dev rollup-plugin-fast-typescript esbuild

For swc:

npm install --save-dev rollup-plugin-fast-typescript @swc/core

For Sucrase:

npm install --save-dev rollup-plugin-fast-typescript sucrase

Usage

The simpler, the better.

// rollup.config.js
import fastTypescript from 'rollup-plugin-fast-typescript'

export default {
  ...
  plugins: [
    fastTypescript('esbuild') // or 'swc' or 'sucrase'
  ]
}

This will load your project's tsconfig.json and use the specified transformer to transpile your code to Javascript.

Starting with version 2.1.0, the plugin also exports these three convenience functions:

• esbuild(tsconfig) is an alias for fastTypescript('esbuild', tsconfig)
• swc(tsconfig) is an alias for fastTypescript('swc', tsconfig)
• sucrase(tsconfig) is an alias for fastTypescript('sucrase', tsconfig)

For example:

// rollup.config.js
import { swc } from 'rollup-plugin-fast-typescript'

export default {
  ...
  plugins: [
    swc()   // Use swc to transpile TypeScript
  ]
}

Options

rollup-plugin-fast-typescript's parti pris is to mimic the behavior of the real TypeScript compiler as closely as possible (two obvious exceptions here are type checking and declaration files generation, since none of the supported transpilers support these features), so the plugin doest not offer any option to play with other than the choice of the transpiler to use and the tsconfig.json settings to use.

fastTypescript(
  transpiler: 'esbuild' | 'swc' | 'sucrase',
  tsconfig?: boolean | string | TsConfigJson | (() => MaybePromise<boolean | string | TsConfigJson>)
)

esbuild(tsconfig?: boolean | string | TsConfigJson | (() => MaybePromise<boolean | string | TsConfigJson>))

swc(tsconfig?: boolean | string | TsConfigJson | (() => MaybePromise<boolean | string | TsConfigJson>))

sucrase(tsconfig?: boolean | string | TsConfigJson | (() => MaybePromise<boolean | string | TsConfigJson>))

Option: transpiler

Type: 'esbuild' | 'swc' | 'sucrase'
Optional: no

When using the generic fastTypescript export, you must specify the name of the transpiler to use.

Again, remember that this plugin does not ship with, nor will it install for you, any of these transpilers; it is your responsibility to install the tool you plan to use.

Option: tsconfig

Type: boolean | string | TsConfigJson | (() => MaybePromise<boolean | string | TsConfigJson>)
Optional: yes
Default: true

Specifies how to resolve TypeScript options:

• true (the default) will load your project's tsconfig.json file.
  • Note: The file is assumed to live in the current working directory.
• a non-empty string is assumed to be the path to the tsconfig.json file to load (e.g., './tsconfig.prod.json') or the name of an installed npm package exposing a tsconfig.json file (e.g., '@tsconfig/node16/tsconfig.json').
• an object is assumed to be a TsConfigJson object (note: the TsConfigJson interface is re-exported from type-fest).
• false or an empty string will cause the selected transpiler to use its own default settings.
• finally, if this parameter is a function, it must return any of the above, or a promise to a any of the above.

Things you should know

• The plugin aims to emit the same code TypeScript's tsc would have given the passed tsconfig.json, no more, no less. Therefore, none of the supported transpilers specificities/unique features are exposed. In the simplest case, the transpiler is just a "get rid of type annotations" tool -- and a very fast one, for that matter.
  To achieve its goal, the plugin does its best to call the selected transpiler's transform API with settings derived from the passed tsconfig.json. For example, TypeScript's target setting is mapped to the transpiler's corresponding setting.
  
• Because Rollup internally works with ESM source files, the transpiler's output is always set to 'esm'.
  • swc does not handle Typescript's import assignments when targetting esm and will error out when it encounters one.

Generated warnings

The plugin may issue a few warnings during the build phase; here are their meaning.

isolatedModules

Because none of the third-party transpilers the plugin uses under the hood is type-aware, some techniques or features often used in TypeScript are not properly checked and can cause mis-compilation or even runtime errors.

To mitigate this, you should set the isolatedModules option to true in tsconfig and let your editor warn you when such incompatible constructs are used.

You should also run tsc --noEmit sometime in your build steps to double check.

License

MIT