I confirmed, it's faster than the Go version, which is very surprising, and super impressive!
Caveats:
- I don't think it's right to say that it's "written in TypeScript". In fact, it's written in the subscript of TypeScript that scriptc supports. scriptc isn't just a subset of ts; it even diverges from ts semantics in sneaky ways to facilitate its optimizations. So, these folks have really created a TypeScript-like native language with some kind of RC-GC hybrid and a bunch of caveats. Not clear if this is any better than just creating a new language.
- Very likely that it was codeveloped with scriptc, so it's getting maximum benefit from exactly the sorts of idioms that scriptc supports well. And, I would bet they landed optimizations to scriptc specifically to get this result.
This could be useful, assuming they invest in supporting it, and you're the sort of person who needs 2x faster ts compiles.
Well, if you write a library in the scriptc subset, it will also work in regular JavaScript runtimes, for free. (Unless you rely on, e.g., catching runtime errors thrown by failed casts, but that's easy enough to avoid.) That seems like a clear advantage over creating a new language.
What I do think would be nice would be if all the tweak-JS-semantics-for-optimization-purposes projects (scriptc, Static Hermes, Nova, possibly Closure Compiler) got together and agreed on a minimal set of rules that TypeScript code should follow in order to be compatible with all of them. Then there could be a push for commonly used npm packages to adhere to those rules, and advertise that they do so in order to be fully optimized.
There is another project that also converted the go version to rust and got 2x performance like bun did, but will also generate .d.ts files where bun does not.
The back and forth between writing tools in javascript and go or rust seems like it's in an unstable equilibrium right now:
- Go / Rust: It's easier than ever to rewrite existing tools in more performand languages
- Javascript: The v8 runtime for vercel or cloudflare workers is a much cheaper way to run certain workloads (e.g. conversational agents) than running a heavy weight vm. See just bash as another example project for taking advantage of this (https://github.com/vercel-labs/just-bash)
Running Rust code in V8 via WebAssembly works today, though the tooling could benefit from a bit more polish. Go sort of works, but less well; IIUC fixing this would require adding more features to Wasm, most especially interior pointers, so that its garbage collection behavior can be made semantically compatible with Go's.
Those offer a more streamlined developer experience than traditional cloud VMs, but still require just as much compute resources (apart from being able to scale to zero if you can tolerate cold starts). E.g., you still have to choose how many data centers they run in and which ones, which is laden with tradeoffs, whereas every Cloudflare Worker runs in every Cloudflare DC, for free.
This version can additionally be compiled through LLVM, using a compiler from Vercel supporting a subset of TypeScript. I tried and it is 2 to 3x faster than the native Go version.
So it's just the compiling that's faster? Still not clear on the point of this, I have some pretty absurdly large typescript projects and have never felt that the compiler was slow, even before 7
There is no obvious explanation for why you would want this anywhere I can find... Does anyone understand? If you wanted this, wouldn't it make more sense to extend the last version of TypeScript before ts-go instead? Hmm.
Stage 1 to writing a bootstrap able language is using the intermediate step of compiling it with a compiler written in another language so that you can write a compiler for yours. I’m sure they did this in order to get a binary of the first self-compilable version.
Apparently it's 2/3 times faster than the Go version.
Whatever one think, the fact that there's 4 vibe coded compilers, 2 of those with 100% coverage of the official one and all being much faster than the Go version should be a wake up call for the TypeScript team.
Despite the resources and having a huge team of people that are clearly good at programming languages and compilers, something is definitely not working as it should there if vibecoders can get much faster fully compliant compilers.
I think a bit differently. The real problem with vibe coding is that it's hard to write a precise specification of the problem. But if the specification is accurate, running the AI dozens of times tends to make it much faster than a human (purely from experience). However, for most problems where vibe coding is actually useful, a human still has to set the initial framing.
Caveats:
- I don't think it's right to say that it's "written in TypeScript". In fact, it's written in the subscript of TypeScript that scriptc supports. scriptc isn't just a subset of ts; it even diverges from ts semantics in sneaky ways to facilitate its optimizations. So, these folks have really created a TypeScript-like native language with some kind of RC-GC hybrid and a bunch of caveats. Not clear if this is any better than just creating a new language.
- Very likely that it was codeveloped with scriptc, so it's getting maximum benefit from exactly the sorts of idioms that scriptc supports well. And, I would bet they landed optimizations to scriptc specifically to get this result.
This could be useful, assuming they invest in supporting it, and you're the sort of person who needs 2x faster ts compiles.
What I do think would be nice would be if all the tweak-JS-semantics-for-optimization-purposes projects (scriptc, Static Hermes, Nova, possibly Closure Compiler) got together and agreed on a minimal set of rules that TypeScript code should follow in order to be compatible with all of them. Then there could be a push for commonly used npm packages to adhere to those rules, and advertise that they do so in order to be fully optimized.
Edit: found it: https://github.com/tunnckoCoreHQ/tsgolint-rust
- Go / Rust: It's easier than ever to rewrite existing tools in more performand languages
- Javascript: The v8 runtime for vercel or cloudflare workers is a much cheaper way to run certain workloads (e.g. conversational agents) than running a heavy weight vm. See just bash as another example project for taking advantage of this (https://github.com/vercel-labs/just-bash)
I'm curious to see what happens!
I don’t get it. Isn’t the golang version already native?
Or is this one of those things where it’s not supposed to make sense?
https://t.co/fMEAmv2VDY
Whatever one think, the fact that there's 4 vibe coded compilers, 2 of those with 100% coverage of the official one and all being much faster than the Go version should be a wake up call for the TypeScript team.
Despite the resources and having a huge team of people that are clearly good at programming languages and compilers, something is definitely not working as it should there if vibecoders can get much faster fully compliant compilers.