TypeScript

You can leave tsc running in watch mode using tsc -w -p . and it will generate .js files for you in a live fashion, so you can run node foo.js like normal.

To run a single TypeScript file without compiling the whole project, there is ts-node that will compile the code on the fly and run it through Node:

npx ts-node src/foo.ts

It took me a while to figure out the solution to this problem - it's in the original question. You need to have a script that calls tsc in your package.json file so that you can run:

npm run tsc 

Include -- before you pass in options (or just include them in the script):

npm run tsc -- -v

Here's an example package.json:

{
  "name": "foo",
  "scripts": {
    "tsc": "tsc"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "typescript": "^1.8.10"
  }
}