Blocked by move to node24 (LTS) from node18 #1072

Hey @mattzcarey thanks for this! @pcarleton and I discussed and we're not sure introducing this relatively new dependency over tsc. In general we would aim to minimize introduction of new dependencies as much as possible unless absolutely necessary. tsc seems simpler to maintain compatibility and is apparently slated to get faster by EOY.

Couldn't we address these issues here without needing to introduce tsdown?

Build scripts were messy,
tsconfigs were different between cjs and esm.
Dev experience was tough because there was no clean command.
Examples were bundled in the lib code increasing package size

Hey @felixweinberger.

Agreed tsc is great as a typechecker. It is getting faster and finds more bugs than ever in its new tsgo rewrite (please see my pr #1075 for adding a check script)

The main reason to switch to tsdown is to reduce footguns in the build process. You can see one of them in action with the non standard *.js imports. That would have not been the case with tsdown (or much harder to get wrong)

In general it has these advantages:

1. Faster builds - Uses esbuild under the hood
2. Simpler dual CJS/ESM - One config vs. build scripts + multiple tsconfigs
3. Built-in bundling - Can easily exclude files from output (like examples) and HAS tree-shaking
4. Better DX - Single source of truth for configuration, lives in package.json, builds to your tsconfig.json spec automatically

If you dont change to tsdown you will have to always be thinking about whether these things are correct and the likelihood of doing something weird is just higher.

@mattzcarey tsdown uses rolldown, not esbuild

Also thetypes field can be omitted, so we don't need to modify those fileds
rolldown/tsdown#253

Done in main, in prep for v2