Support non-ambient ".ts" modules

[aleclarson]

I'm curious why support for non-ambient (eg: .ts not .d.ts) definitions was removed.

I don't want this plugin to emit anything other than the .d.ts bundle, but it would be nice to avoid generating intermediate .d.ts modules. Also, with ts-loader and awesome-typescript-loader, it's not possible to generate .d.ts modules if you want to use a forked process for type checking (eg: with fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin).

To be clear, I don't want this plugin to perform type checking, either.

[aleclarson]

I just realized the dumbness of mentioning Webpack plugins in an issue about a Rollup plugin. 😂
I must've confused myself temporarily, but the issue still stands. I would like to avoid intermediate .d.ts modules if possible. Otherwise, I'll need to figure out how to emit .d.ts modules with rollup-plugin-typescript2 before running this plugin.

Maybe there's a way to feed the .d.ts modules generated by rollup-plugin-typescript2 into this plugin?

[Swatinem]

I gave my reasons in #29. In short, using the typescript compiler for anything else than just as a parser is really not-trivial.
And I don’t want to put in all the duplicated effort into supporting all the different ways how people want to build/manage their projects (like #28).
Easiest way is to delegate that task to other tools, such as the tsc cli itself.

For me personally the transition was really easy and smooth, see 7ea4a02 and eversport/intl-codegen@412f1bf

This also opens up the door to maybe kick out ts-jest as well at some point, since it starts to really annoy me recently. Also, as you see, I don’t need any plugin/loader anymore to bundle up my .js code anymore. Which is a win. So instead of N tools, each of which is different in some subtle ways, and supports a different set of features (like --incremental or project references), I try to rely on tsc only, without any other third party tools that could potentially break in surprising ways.

[aleclarson]

In short, using the typescript compiler for anything else than just as a parser is really not-trivial.

It's not easy to generate ambient declarations from a set of .ts modules, and then feed those directly to rollup-plugin-dts to escape the need for intermediate files?

And I don’t want to put in all the duplicated effort into supporting all the different ways how people want to build/manage their projects

Sure, but I don't see this as a slippery slope. All I want is to avoid intermediate files. :)

[Swatinem]

All I want is to avoid intermediate files. :)

I thought the same some months ago, now I changed my mind about this :-)