tsc --build / Project References Feedback & Discussion

Continuation of #3469 "Medium-sized Projects" which has grown too large for GitHub to display comfortably

Please use this thread for feedback, general discussion, questions, or requests for help / "is this a bug" discussions.

Active bugs / PRs in this area:

• https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript-Handbook/pull/788 Handbook page

Possible next steps:

• (none yet; @andy-ms) Find unloaded downstream projects during rename
• #25376 Infer project references from monorepo tooling package.json files
• #25562 Terse mode output for tsc -b
• (none yet; @weswigham ?) Intermediate build outputs to temp folders
• (none; stretch) Parallelization / worker processes under tsc -b

Other interesting links:

• https://github.com/RyanCavanaugh/learn-a - sample project references repo using lerna
• https://github.com/RyanCavanaugh/project-references-outfile - sample project references repo using --outFile
• https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/3469#issuecomment-341317069 Ryan's outline of what we're doing/did and why
• https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/3469#issuecomment-400439520 pre-draft of handbook page
• https://github.com/RyanCavanaugh/learn-a/pull/3/files learn-a repo using yarn workspaces!

Start by reading the outline in issue #3469 and the linked project-references examples to understand the scope of tsc --build. Choose a concrete follow-up such as #25376 or #25562, then use that issue's acceptance criteria to define what done means; this thread itself has no single implementation target.