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Single Executable Application (SEA) with TypeScript type stripping #64723
Description
What is the problem this feature will solve?
Node does an excellent job of executing TypeScript via type stripping. Node also appears to do an excellent job of building a single executable application from JavaScript files. Those features do not work together, as in Node cannot produce a single executable application from TypeScript files.
What is the feature you are proposing to solve the problem?
Use the type stripping feature already in Node to strip types from TypeScript files when building a single executable application (SEA).
What alternatives have you considered?
No response
Activity
louwers commentedon Oct 4, 2026
I don't think Node.js supports building a single executable application from JavaScript files. Does it?
The docs talk about the need for a bundled script.
prettydiff commentedon Oct 4, 2026
@louwers Yes, the SEA feature requires use of a configuration file and file contents. The problem I encountered is that I got SEA to work and produce a bundled executable file and the file did execute, but that execution only produced syntax errors. The code files came into the bundling process as literal strings. That is fine if the code is JavaScript, but is bad if the code is TypeScript and type stripping is not applied.
This issue is several months old now and so I am struggling to remember the exact steps I used to execute the SEA feature. This could very well be my user error. If there is not a means to include TypeScript files for bundling into a SEA build using Node's conventions then its a missing feature. The distinction used to not matter just a couple years back, but now that Node executes TypeScript files directly without a separate build step the concern is valid because there are no JavaScript files generated since static builds to JavaScript are no longer necessary.