- 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!
> ...than running a heavy weight vm.
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?
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.
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.
drewbitt•1h ago