The performance of "tsc --noEmit a.ts" is identical, and it makes no difference vs. just typing "tsc a.ts", and it doesn't really solve "compile on demand" (with type checks) in any case.

I looked in to this some time ago, because I couldn't believe it was this slow, and tsc just has a huge startup cost. Once it gets going it's alright (I think? Don't quote me) but to get started takes a long time. It's actually already improved because not too long ago it was more like 3 seconds (probably because of the parallelisation, which is kind of cheating IMO).

I don't know about Java as I never really used it, but complex build systems are not unique to TS of course, but what they are in TS is mandatory for any reasonable experience because it works around the fact the compiler is so damn slow. That's a huge difference you can get started without too much effort, and you can do "smart" things fairly easily as I mentioned in my earlier comment.

> they simply haven't yet developed a big enough base to grow contentious enough to have divergent solutions.

C, C++, Go, Rust, Python, Ruby, PHP don't have a "big enough base"? Ehhh

And my entire point is that TS LACKS "divergent solutions". Because it's so slow lots of solutions are simply not practical.