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.
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.
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, in some case even almost 4x faster.
I am curious why it's faster. Golang isn't that much slower than Rust, aside from the garbage collector. 4x performance improvements is much bigger than what I expected.
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.
I think the future of this is -- get your AI agent to investigate this port for anything actually worthwhile, comparing it to the go version, and then take those good ideas and actually maybe bring them into the real compiler.
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.
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.
Was it ever a reasonable choice? At the time the choice was made the tooling ecosystem was already split between Rust and JS, and by putting TS in Go they chose to split it three ways. Why not split it 4 or 5 ways then? The pressure will always be towards less duplicated work.
The only real choice of language to build the next generation of JS tools in is JS. Anything else is a vote of no confidence in ourselves.
Wasm is a first-class target for Rust, which produces faster and smaller Wasm binaries. My understanding is that you need to use TinyGo to reasonably target Wasm with Go.
Go having a garbage collector isn't necessarily bad, since Wasm has GC, but I think Go's GC can't easily use Wasm GC because Go has interior pointers.
I'm assuming they mean because it doesn't need a garbage collector or much of a runtime at all. You can target direct to WASM and use I guess WASI, while Go brings with it a garbage collector and so on.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
The clear reason this has worth is that it's much faster than TSC.
> 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.
Maybe. Who knows, it's all changing so fast!
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
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.
The only real choice of language to build the next generation of JS tools in is JS. Anything else is a vote of no confidence in ourselves.
Go having a garbage collector isn't necessarily bad, since Wasm has GC, but I think Go's GC can't easily use Wasm GC because Go has interior pointers.
I already pay for subs on both but the tokens are already spoken for with other projects
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.
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...
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.
I wonder how much AI companies lost on this?
Edit: not that I’m worried about them, I’m just curious
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...
i'd bet this is a few subscriptions over a few months rather than paying directly for tokens.
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.