Snowpack: https://snowpack.dev
HMR for Svelte mentioned in the Readme, which makes it a winner for me!
npx create-snowpack-app --template @snowpack/app-template-svelte new-folder
"Snowpack is a faster build tool for modern web apps. Snowpack leverages ESM imports in your application to remove unnecessary bundling work during development. The end result is a build tool that starts up instantly and wastes no time rebuilding on every change. See changes reflected in the browser instantly."
Other contenders:
esbuild: https://github.com/evanw/esbuild
Vite: https://github.com/vitejs/vite
Kinda related:
Sucrase (https://www.npmjs.com/package/sucrase) is like babel-lite; smaller scope, assumes modern browsers, upto 20x faster than babel and typescript. Instead of ts-node index.ts, try running sucrase-node index.ts.
Deno takes some inspiration from Go and pulls deps directly from GitHub without npm (or a package manager). I have yet to wrap my head around it … but conceptually I like the idea that a deno script is a "single" file rather than a pile of files. OTOH, PHP's phar never gained as much traction … I mean when was the last time you downloaded a "cli script" that was actually a phar? Also deno is uses typescript natively.