JSR: The JavaScript Registry

Thecwayvi understand it in theory, the typescript version a library uses could disappear forever the day after a library had been published to JSR and all would be fine.

Until someone wants to maintain the code of course, but then you'd have the exact same problem with the elusive typescript version if the repository only took compile output.

What JSR would break (or make a deliberately difficult path?) is using some private fork of typescript that isn't even available on the day of publication.

The benefit of JSR, as far as I understand it, is offering an easy path to publication that makes type parts not an extra that some might skip but a reliable default. It does make me wonder however, how long-term reliable the finding will be: JSR promises more service than registries before, while also being more tool agnostic. I'm not sure if it's true, but my impression was that in many cases, the registry was primarily bankrolled by however the tooling was funded, e.g. effectively becoming a marketing expense to selling tooling expertise. JSR appears particularly removed from any of that and it's bad enough when the repository fades away in terms of static hosting, it's worse if it also leaves your library without a build process.

The whole reason isolated declarations is taking so long is because we also worry about making the requirements of this too onerous. To this end with isolated declarations, you do have to specify most types, but not all. For expression where we can reasonably infer the type from local context, we do so.

This should ease some of the developer friction. Not all of it. Some things will not be inferrable, but things like primitive types, object literals, tuples will be so it should make it easier.

We also worked on a code fixer that adds explicit type annotations where this new flag would raise an error, again to help people migrate if they choose to do so.

I first read this line to mean that JSR contains every package on NPM, and was just doing some post-processing on them. But it does seem to be its own registry. Maybe the intent of the line was to communicate that you can install packages from both?

I very much like the added TypeScript support (which the standard NPM registry does not have.) and that it's open-source.

I'll see about getting my packages uploaded onto here, too -- just having built-in support for TypeScript makes packaging x100 easier.

Regarding NPM, it's absolutely insane that we've been depending upon a closed-source, monolithic nightmare with poor UX for so long. You can't even use comments in package.json -- overall, it feels like a holdover we haven't figured out how to replace.

Furthermore, it's scary that Microsoft, through GitHub, now hold so much power over the JavaScript industry -- enshittification will most likely ensue.