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Comment by mohamedhegazy | Hacker News Reader

You can just use `--target ESNext` and this will disable all ES features transformations and just erase types.

Thank you!!! This is the one answer I was looking for. And it seems to be very recent, committed Nov 7 for 2.1:

https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/pull/12160/commits/7...

Looking at the discussion on GitHub for the issue that lead to this commit I'm a little amazed at how much difficulty some people seem to have had with the simple concept. "Just pass it through without code changes, only remove type information." Why does that lead to such convoluted discussions? Oh well, it's been done.

I assume it's because "no code changes" implies you could potentially be creating something that doesn't run where you want it to. Modern JS development means you need to be aware of the EcmaScript version you're writing in, and the version you're targetting. Once you're aware of it, transpiling with TypeScript means you don't necessarily need to target `esnext`: if you write ES5 and target ES5, it'll just remove the types as expected.

The downside of using `esnext` everywhere is that someone might be employing a feature that is not widely supported in the target browser/JS engine. So it's pretty bad to start with that as a default without an understanding of the consequences.

  "no code changes" implies you could potentially be creating 
  something that doesn't run where you want it to.

Eh... I don't see how those arguments are possibly serious? Is this forced hand-holding of adult people truly your attitude? I deliberately select a non-default option. You (not directly you probably, but you chose to represent that POV) don't know anything about me or my situation. But immediately you start worrying about stuff you don't know anything about, that I might not know what I'm doing, might... could... possibly... hypothetically... Sorry, but this reply, or the attitude you presented which I know may not be your own, really pisses me off, to say it quite frankly. Don't even try to defend the forced(!) nanny attitude, even if you just tried to present what you think is other people's argument.

"You" in my comment means a hypothetical person who could be doing the changes. It wasn't directed at you personally, since it's obvious I know nothing about your context or environment.

I'll be more careful about writing "one" instead of "you" next time.

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