tsd

People interact with DefinitelyTyped in a set of ways, from currently most common to least common: 1. NuGet packages, which are built from the GitHub repository but then redistributed over a non-Github CDN (NuGet's) 2. tsd management tool (https://github.com/Definitelytyped/tsd), which looks like it prefers Github's CDN raw URLs rather than full/shallow git clones 3. typings management tool (https://github.com/typings/typings) with "ambient" typings searches (`--ambient` flag), which I believe also prefers Github's CDN raw URLs, as it essentially forked from TSD That said, it's past time to move beyond the giant huge DefinitelyTyped repo, and I for one heartily recommend people migrate to typings which has better support for NPM and other module and package management systems, as well as smaller unit/module-focused Github repositories.

I've had the same experience with node, but normally there aren't that many problems with V8 or the language itself. Most of the rough corners seem to be in node's core libraries. IMO this is what we need: * a better designed standard library. Maybe more like Dart's[1] - we already have Bluebird as the de-facto replacement for callbacks - all we need now are something like Dart's streams to fix the built in quirky streams. * built from the ground up with optional types i.e. TypeScript or Flow (eliminates most of JS's type-related quirks while preserving most of the dynamism and duck typing and being very helpful when the time comes to refactor) Now that typescript has support for type definitions inside node_modules[2] there are no barriers remaining to do this. node + V8 + typescript can provide a development experience that matches Dart

Wait.. Are you talking about what's described here: https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/2242 I just did a small typescript prototype and used the import syntax there. It might have been your typescript version as 1.5 recently came out (and I was using the 1.5 beta 2). The hardest part is what you described at the start. If it doesn't have a type definition it's hard. DefinitelyTyped helps a lot (https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/tsd) I had to create a type definition for something that wasn't there. It was annoying because I had to make the equivalent of a header file before I could use a library.