WelsonJS: Build a Windows app on the Windows built-in JavaScript engine

I saw a partial example, but not clear instructions on how to bootstrap a project. Did I miss it in the README? Or should it be obvious to me if I have some XYZ experience?

Quite amazing solution. From the .hta file you can see it was inspired by VBScript (whose most popular software is ILOVEYOU I guess).<p>It looks like the ultimate hack, but why not ? It&#x27;s very creative and the intention is good as well: TypeScript&#x2F;JavaScript is a very popular language. Though C#.NET is great as well.<p>It could make sense in the very long-term that Microsoft themselves explore this possibility.<p>Ultimately &quot;TypeScript.NET or JavaScript.NET&quot;

Before anyone gets the wild idea to use this, beware HTAs, VBScript, etc. are slated for removal from Windows around 2027.

HTAs are tied to MSHTML.dll (the old IE renderer) and WSH&#x2F;CScript is tied to the old, slow IE javascript engine, right?<p>I would expect this to have very limited compatibility, and even with the transpiling, very limited performance. Or is it possible for this to somehow use Chakra, or Edge&#x27;s V8 engine?

Despite being down on all the extras, I wanna reiterate - I do think this is a cool project and I dig that HTAs are still around.

Been doing this since 1999. The only thing novel I see here is the transpilers - but you know… you don’t need that. You can build HTAs with native JavaScript, CSS and HTML - and with a little VBScript mixin, directly work with Windows libs. Back in ‘99 and early 00’s I was delivering “thin-client” control panels &amp; management tools for server farms, sensitive accounting data, among a variety of other things. It was (and likely still is) a great way to provide a web interface as a desktop app for scenarios where exposing the management interface to the open web is undesirable.<p>Nifty project, but IMHO the world is better off using native JavaScript without all the BS that comes with TypeScript, etc. JavaScript is so powerful and amazing, it’s a bummer to hamstring your app by using TypeScript and classic OO inheritance models that preclude the beauty and dynamics of JavaScript as a functional, prototypal language.