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Why transpile to files instead of in memory?

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Operations Research Engineering Software+ edited this page Dec 25, 2017 · 3 revisions

Suman has full support for both in-memory and disk transpilation for JS based tests. Suman does not have a preference, but in general Suman may encourage developers to transpile test source to disk.

There are at least 3 good reasons for this:

  1. If you have already transpiled the file, and the source files haven't changed since, then you don't need to transpile again! Saves time when executing the tests. This is a big one :) In other words, maybe your application code has changed, but your test source hasn't. So just run the test target files, without re-transpiling them.

  2. Transpiled test files on disk helps you debug, in this case of transpilation issues, etc. Babel, TypeScript, etc, are still not perfect.

  3. Code coverage - you will want/need to run Istanbul against your target files instead of source files.

On the other hand, the advantages of in-memory are significant. The biggest advantage is:

  1. By monkey-patching require(), babel-register and ts-node can ensure all relevant files get transpiled. It can be difficult to ensure all source gets included and transpiled when writing target files to disk.

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