Watch Options

TypeScript 3.8 shipped a new strategy for watching directories, which is crucial for efficiently picking up changes to node_modules.

On operating systems like Linux, TypeScript installs directory watchers (as opposed to file watchers) on node_modules and many of its subdirectories to detect changes in dependencies. This is because the number of available file watchers is often eclipsed by the number of files in node_modules, whereas there are way fewer directories to track.

Because every project might work better under different strategies, and this new approach might not work well for your workflows, TypeScript 3.8 introduces a new watchOptions field which allows users to tell the compiler/language service which watching strategies should be used to keep track of files and directories.

assumeChangesOnlyAffectDirectDependencies

• Released: 3.8

When this option is enabled, TypeScript will avoid rechecking/rebuilding all truly possibly-affected files, and only recheck/rebuild files that have changed as well as files that directly import them.

This can be considered a 'fast & loose' implementation of the watching algorithm, which can drastically reduce incremental rebuild times at the expense of having to run the full build occasionally to get all compiler error messages.