Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the problem here, or why it's JS module specific.

Source maps with pretty great, and if you're in a development setup where you say only compile out types and resolve import specifiers, they work spectacularly well, including in debuggers.

View on HN

Source maps are indeed very helpful when they work, but in my experience, often they don’t for third-party modules. This seems to be an ecosystem thing. The documentation for package.json doesn’t mention sourcemaps?

According to this bug [1], even the typescript compiler’s npm doesn’t include source or sourcemaps.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/32207

Yeah, other than a project that was still on webpack, I can't think of any time in the last few years where this was a problem. Vite has made JavaScript apps nearly effortless for years now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com