Tools I Use for JavaScript Library Development

Next

These are the tools and libraries I'm planning to use for my next JavaScript project.

• TypeScript as the source language
  • Why? It's ubiquitous and expressive.
  • I'm not thrilled about its level of soundness compared to Flow, but it's not too bad if you never mutate objects and you parse JSON inputs strictly (discarding unrecognized object fields).
  • tsconfig.json settings include:
    • strict obviously
    • isolatedDeclarations - for compatibility with JSR.
    • noUncheckedIndexedAccess
• Node.js v24 as the JS runtime
  • Why? It can run TypeScript without a separate compilation step. Node is the most popular runtime and the best supported by libraries etc.
  • v24 is the latest supported version. 23 is end-of-life. 22 is the latest long-term support release, but it can't run TypeScript.
• nvm as the Node version manager
  • Why? It's easy to install, and, more importantly, easy to uninstall. By using a version manager, I can have multiple Node versions installed and easily switch between them.
• pnpm as the package manager
  • I'm not too sure about this one. pnpm is fast and has some nice features, but I've also seen bugs like --frozen-lockfile continuing to install packages when the lockfile and package.json don't match.
• make as the task runner
  • Why? It's installed just about everywhere, and it's package-manager agnostic. No need to remember whether it's pnpm mytask or yarn mytask or whatever else. If I want to switch package managers (see above) it's pretty easy to do if I have make shims for everything.
• @benchristel/taste as the test framework
  • Why? It's fast, has all the features I need, and has none that I don't. And if I don't like something about it, I can change it.
  • I really do need to productize a runner for it, though, and move some of its functions to their own packages. I find myself reaching for Taste for all kinds of non-test stuff, and it gets into my production builds, which feels weird.
• typescript-formatter as the formatter
  • Why? Some alternatives:
    • Prettier's algorithm, which both wraps long lines and unwraps short ones, often creates bizarre and inconsistent formatting. Prettier would be my favorite formatter if it would only treat 80 columns as a maximum and respect my manually-inserted line breaks.
    • Biome is essentially the same as Prettier.
    • @stylistic/eslint-plugin requires a lot of configuration and doesn't seem to fully understand TypeScript syntax. E.g. it can't decide whether object type literals are blocks or objects.
    • typescript-formatter seems to format things basically the same as my ESLint configuration. It even understands JSX! It's also much faster than ESLint. I think all this goodness comes from the fact that it uses TypeScript's own parser (as a peer dependency) rather than reinventing the wheel.
• tstyche for typetesting
  • Why? It's much faster than tsd. It has a watch mode. It has nice error formatting.
• husky as the git hooks framework
  • Why? I want to run make lint as a pre-commit hook. I hate having formatting-only commits cluttering up my git history. Enforcing a pre-commit hook in the repo itself ensures I'll never commit badly formatted code.
• knip to remove unused code.
• bumpp to do releases
  • Why? It's simple and does what I need. Changesets is an alternative I've used, but it's designed for large teams that release infrequently. I don't want to have to write a changeset file for every commit — I'd rather read through the Git log and diff before releasing.

Wanted

• Documentation generator. Ideally, I'd like to use a "literate programming lite" style where I can write JSDoc comments and have a website generated automatically from that.
  • true-myth uses typedoc for this purpose.
  • typedoc-plugin-markdown looks promising for integrating with vitepress, docusaurus, or mdsite.
• Performance testing tools.