Rust Port of TypeScript (Tsc)

https://github.com/pingdotgg/ts-rust

41•jcbhmr•1h ago

Comments

ingen0s•57m ago

Wait - you spent north of $400,000?

colomo•54m ago

$420,000 worth of tokens, though I'm pretty sure he used subs.

spense•53m ago

> I did over $400,000 in API priced tokens

i'd bet this is a few subscriptions over a few months rather than paying directly for tokens.

hedgehog•53m ago

Sibling dead comment said it already but that's likely an estimate of what it would cost via API and in practice it was a few hundred or thousand dollars of subscription fees.

JacobAsmuth•44m ago

Most of it was wasted on OpenAI tokens. It actually cost them $24k USD according to the github description.

sghiassy•37m ago

Assuming he used $400,000 in tokens, but used subs

I wonder how much AI companies lost on this?

Edit: not that I’m worried about them, I’m just curious

esperent•26m ago

> I wonder how much AI companies lost on this?

Probably zero, or even a profit. The idea that these companies are making a loss on subscriptions is an unsubstantiated HN fallacy.

On the contrary, they're probably making a small profit on subscriptions, or at least break even, and absolute bank on API pricing. Anthropic recently reported an 80% gross profit margin, for example.

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/anthropic-t...

adrianvincent•8m ago

Profitable, if you just ignore how much money they spend

janalsncm•6m ago

Excited for their IPO just to put this to bed, one way or another.

MBCook•6m ago

What are “subs”?

Rapzid•12m ago

People love to flex by using the API costs for their subscription tokens.

I personally find it ridiculous. The cost is what you paid, not what someone else could have paid. Markets and all that.

It would be like using spot instances on AWS but flexing by boasting about how much on-demand $$ compute you used.

fwlr•54m ago

    # “The Slop Line"

      Everything below this was written by my LLMs, not me.

I really appreciate this convention, thank you.

DanRosenwasser•50m ago

TypeScript team member here - this is impressive work, and it's honestly crazy that 3 of these ports have popped up in the last week! I'm currently AFK but we're hoping to learn more and we'll have more to say on this soon.

vaughands•45m ago

Kudos for keeping up! Golang seemed like a very reasonable choice when you ported there originally but the world is changing _fast_.

zdragnar•38m ago

Why do you think Golang is no longer a reasonable choice?

lifthrasiir•33m ago

Presumably because Rust is more suitable than Go in agentic coding? (I'm not sure, but that seems the purported answer.)

lifeisloving•7m ago

Language and compiler design/ implementation is very much a human task. There's lots of nuances to consider. I doubt they want agent spaghetti code in their codebase either.

spankalee•30m ago

Rust is better at targeting WebAssembly

teki_one

elcritch•46m ago

I'm curious how much unsafe this uses? Are these ports making idiomatic code or just using unsafe all over. There doesn't seem to be anything in the readme.

dbalatero•36m ago

Have a look yourself: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Apingdotgg%2Fts-rust+unsaf...

Doesn't look like any on skim, also looks like an explicit goal was to avoid unsafe code: https://github.com/pingdotgg/ts-rust/blob/ad8f2746ea85a6354b...

bitpush•36m ago

Is this going to be a serious project? No.

Is this going to be maintained? Nope

Nevertheless this and many others are showing what is possible. Much akin to how someone ports doom onto a microwave.

We'll look back at this time with great fondness when we collectively discovered a whole new gear.

pvillano•33m ago

I have to wonder if LLM reimplementations verified against years of human tests will have holes where original authors thought that tests are not necessary and common sense is enough.

I have to wonder this to preserve my ego as a human. I wonder have to this because I sure as hell am never going to go through all that code to check.

catlifeonmars•27m ago

This post should be titled “Rust port of Go rewrite of Typescript compiler”

fiatpandas•24m ago

Are there any specific harnesses or techniques to aid in porting stuff to Rust? Specialized in terms of token efficiency

hedgehog•20m ago

As much as possible mechanical (non-LLM) verification of equivalence that generates good diagnostic messages, mechanical translation steps that generate good diagnostic messages, a good memory system to reduce rework...

Gigachad•23m ago

I honestly have no idea what the future of tech will look like at this point. Too much has changed.

yoyohello13•23m ago

Maybe there are just so many of these but at this point for vibe coded stuff like this I’m just like “who cares.” LLMs can make stuff like this now. Unless this reaches some critical mass of usage among developers why would I use it? It’s just a less maintained, less tested implementation. The more important question is “what does this teach us?” And idk the answer to that one.

rowanG077•18m ago

Generally building something is not about "What does this teach us?" but rather "What can this be used for?". You don't build a house and as "What does this teach us?". It's honestly almost a perverse question to primarily ask for something that aims to have practical value.

The clear reason this has worth is that it's much faster than TSC.

Capricorn2481•13m ago

That's why the commenter said

> It’s just a less maintained, less tested implementation

Then they asked if it teaches something because it is a risky utility to them. You're trying to make it sound a lot weirder.

rowanG077•7m ago

The point is that it's clearly not just a less maintained, less tested implementation. It's 1.61x faster for one in real world apps.

hannibalhorn•7m ago

In the real world project section, compile times vs tsc7 were 1-3s less. Sometimes the percentages are far more impressive than absolutes.

vaughands•30m ago

I suppose my comment sort of implies this. I think the naive knee jerk reaction is that if you can spit out perfect machine level code against a specification, then logically being closer to bare metal would help with performance. However, without knowing the details of how things worked it is tough to say whether it is truly "reasonable" or not.

But more importantly, the Typescript team themselves [1] picked Golang mostly out of ergonomics and ease of porting at the time. It is becoming more increasingly more to "taste" what ergonomics means. Notably, they did not pick it because they believed it to be the fastest option. But speed was on the mind, giving way to ergonomics and ease of porting. At least, this is my read.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-go/discussions/411

dunham•16m ago

The author of esbuild used Rust and later switched to Go. He describes some of his experience here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336284

It is one person and one project, but I found it interesting to read about his experience.

I like Go, but I probably would have tried Rust first because I want pattern matching when implementing languages.

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