Can I use ts-node as a Node.js-specific version of TypeScript?

[parzhitsky]

From the discussion about API for parsing config files, I stumbled upon an interesting insight: TypeScript does not make any assumptions about the environment. This means that, for example, to write / read / find files (or otherwise work with the filesystem), the corresponding functions have to be provided explicitly; TypeScript can't use API of fs module, because that would mean assuming Node.js environment.

The question is therefore, can I use ts-node for this use-case? Are there any plans on this? Maybe, there is another TypeStrong package, that is designed for that?

import ts from "ts-node";

ts.readConfigFile("./tsconfig.json");