Feature Request: Use ts-node rather than npm watch for boilerplate

[mipearson]

This is a suggestion rather than a bug - something to consider for your boilerplate generated by cdk init:

In my CDK projects I've been doing the following:

cdk init sample-app
npm i ts-node

And then modifying the cdk.json:

{
  "app": "./node_modules/.bin/ts-node -T bin/cdk.ts"
}

The -T flag skips typechecking, speeding up runtime, as I generally have a test suite / editor that will get cross if there's a typing issue.

I've done this as the workflow is a bit easier day to day, and avoids a potential problem when sharing this code with others less familiar with TypeScript where they may not know that they need to compile it & keep that compilation up to date. I also anticipate that people will be directly resistant to this if they're used to Ruby/Python/etc.

[kennu]

Thanks @eladb for pointing to this suggestion in #539. I converted a monorepo project to use this approach (although without the -T option) and it seems to work quite well when sharing the package.json and tsconfig.json for the Stack and its Constructs. Maybe it also works when the Constructs are separate repos/packages but didn't really try it yet.

[mitchlloyd]

@rix0rrr Does the CDK team agree with this change? Happy to submit a PR if that is the case. For people getting introduced to TypeScript through CDK, the boostrapped experience is a little rough.

[eladb]

Sounds good to me. It will definitely reduce some friction. @Doug-AWS this will require some updates to sample code and workshop once it lands.