I'm curious to start looking into / helping out with Javascript support. Is anyone else actively looking at it? I see https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/19240 and I was thinking of experimenting a little with the example repo to start with.

@worried-painter-31382 has been poking at this for some time! And it looks like @witty-family-13337 has some interest (based on https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/pull/20639)

yeah, it would be great to give that backend some love, not having plenty of bandwidth myself but I've defo been poking at it

It looks like @worried-painter-31382 has done a lot already - I will play around and try to add some docs & example repo examples, and generally try to identify any gaps. Please let me know if you're aware of any that don't have an open issue.

That sounds like a good idea - I don't use JS myself so I don't have a sense of what I would even want this to look like. Contributions from actual users is the way to go!

I am not actively looking at it but want to be, I just cant seem to get going again 🙃 The biggest hurdle is the top 2 issues on that GH page, they require some significant changes but are also required to make the backend usable with newer versions of package managers. There has been some effort put onto adding TS goals as well by @fresh-cat-90827.

So @nutritious-hair-72580 sounds like there's stuff to jump in on!

thanks for stopping by @nutritious-hair-72580! I have https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/pull/20293 in progress, but struggle to allocate more time to it, feel free to explore if you are interested in having TypeScript support added

Right now, I'm looking at https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/19236 as it does seem it's critical to get that sorted before working on other items. It's fairly involved though, so slowly working through understanding both the package managers and the backend. I have been wondering if it's actually worth supporting npm - whether it might have been better just to support pnpm initially (or consider pnpm as first-class and others as experimental). It seems (at least at a very surface level) that pnpm has a more thought out approach to workspaces, and the symlinking means less I/O with Pants, and it's not a big lift for anyone to migrate npm -> pnpm.

This is exactly the kind of question that JS-using folks should weigh in on. As not such a person, my opinion carries no weight here. So it's really valuable that you're asking this!