Importree – Import Dependency Trees for TypeScript Files

Name: Importree – Import Dependency Trees for TypeScript Files
Availability: InStock
Author: alexgrozav

by alexgrozav·Mar 8, 2026·1 point·0 comments

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AI Analysis

●●●BangerShip ItSlick

Regex instead of AST parsing: 12ms dependency tree for 500 files versus 50ms+ for competitors.

Strengths

•Benchmarked against madge and dep-tree with concrete numbers—3-4x faster on realistic projects.
•Zero dependencies using only Node.js built-ins, <9kb bundle.
•Pre-computed reverse graph enables instant cache invalidation queries.

Weaknesses

•Niche but real use case—solves a tooling problem, not a product problem developers search for unprompted.
•No Windows-specific edge cases mentioned; regex approach may miss complex import patterns.

Post Description

I built a small library that builds the full import dependency tree for a TypeScript or JavaScript entry file.

Given a changed file, it tells you every file that depends on it. This is useful for things like: - selective test runs - cache invalidation - incremental builds - impact analysis when refactoring

The main focus is speed. Instead of parsing ASTs, importree scans files using carefully tuned regex, which makes it extremely fast even on large projects.

I built it while working on tooling where I needed to quickly determine which parts of a codebase were affected by a change.

Hope you'll find it as useful as I do: https://github.com/alexgrozav/importree

Happy to answer any questions!