I write a lot of tools that depend on the TypeScript compiler API, and they run in a lot of a lot of JS environments including Node and the browser. The current CJS codebase is even a little tricky to load into standard JS module supporting environments like browsers, so I've been _really_ looking forward to what Jake and others have said will be an upcoming standard modules based version.
Is that still happening, and how will the native compiler be distributed for us tools authors? I presume WASM? Will the compiler API be compatible? Transforms, the AST, LanguageService, Program, SourceFile, Checker, etc.?
I'm quite concerned that the migration path for tools could be extremely difficult.
[edit] To add to this as I think about it: I maintain libraries that build on top of the TS API, and are then in turn used by other libraries that still access the TS APIs. Things like framework static analysis, then used by various linters, compilers, etc. Some linters are integrated with eslint via typescript-eslint. So the dependency chain is somewhat deep and wide.
Is the path forward going to be that just the TS compiler has a JS interop layer and the rest stays the same, or are all TS ecosystem tools going to have to port to Go to run well?
Why not something like Rust? Most of the JS ecosystem that is moving toward faster tools seem to be going straight to Rust (Rolldown, rspack (the webpack successor) SWC, OXC, Lightning CSS / Parcel etc) and one of the reasons given is it has really great language constructs for parsers and traversing ASTs (I think largely due to the existence of `match` but i'm not entirely sure)
Was any thought given to this? And if so what was the deciding factors for Go vs something like Rust or another language entirely?
What do you see as the future for use cases where the typescript compiler is embedded in other projects? (Eg. Deno, Jupyter kernels, etc.)
There’s some talk of an inter process api, but vague hand waving here about technical details. What’s the vision?
In TS7 will you be able to embed the compiler? Or is that not supported?
Porting to Go was the right decision, but part of me would've liked to see a different approach to solve the performance issue. Here I'm not thinking about the practicality, but simply about how cool it would've been if performance had instead been improved via:
- porting to OCaml. I contributed to Flow once upon a time, and a version of TypeScript in OCaml would've been huge in unifying the efforts here.
- porting to Rust. Having "official" TypeScript crates in rust would be huge for the Rust javascript-tooling ecosystem.
- a new runtime (or compiler!). I'm thinking here an optional, stricter version of TypeScript that forbids all the dynamic behaviours that make JavaScript hard to optimize. I'm also imagining an interpreter or compiler that can then use this stricter TypeScript to run faster or produce an efficient native binary, skipping JavaScript altogether and using types for optimization.
This last option would've been especially exciting since it is my opinion that Flow was hindered by the lack of dogfooding, at least when I was somewhat involved with the project. I hope this doesn't happen in the TypeScript project.
None of these are questions, just wanted to share these fanciful perspectives. I do agree Go sounds like the right choice, and and in any case I'm excited about the improvement in performance and memory usage. It really is the biggest gripe I have with TypeScript right now!
(FWIW, It must have been a very well thought out rationale.)
Edit: watched the revenant clip from the GH discussion- makes sense. Maybe push NativeAoT to be as good?
I am (positively) surprised Hejlsberg has not used this opportunity to push C#: a rarity in the software world where people never let go of their darlings. :)
This is a big concern to me. Could you expand on what work is left to do for the native implementation of gsc? In particular, can you make an argument why that last bit of work won't reduce these 10x figures we're seeing? I'm worried the marketing got ahead of the engineering
Are there any insights on the platform decision?
One thing I'm curious about: What about updating the original Typescript-based compiler to target WASM and/or native code, without needing to run in a Javascript VM?
Was that considered? What would (at a high level) the obstacles be to achieving similar performance to Golang?
Edit: Clarified to show that I indicate updating the original compiler.
One of the nice advantages of js is that it can run so many places. Will TypeScript still be able to enjoy that legacy going forward, or is native only what we should expect in 7+?
Will the questions and answers be posted anywhere outside of Discord after it's concluded?
Maybe I'm unique, but I prefer to not have the compiler tied up with a paryicular dependency-management/library system.
Really interesting news, and uniquely dismaying to me as someone who is fighting tooth and claw to keep JS language tooling in the JS ecosystem.
My question has to do with Ryan's statement:
> We also considered hybrid approaches where certain components could be written in a native language, while keeping core typechecking algorithms in JavaScript
I've experimented deeply in this area (maybe 15k hours invested in BABLR so far) and what I've found is that it's richly rewarding. Javascript is fast enough for what is needed, and its ability to cache on immutable data can make it lightning fast not through doing more work faster, but by making it possible to do less work. In other words, change the complexity class not the constant factor.
Is this a direction you investigated? What made you decide to try to move sideways instead of forwards?
From a performance perspective, I'd expect C++ and Rust to be much easier targets too, since I've seen quite a few industrial Go services be rewritten in C++/Rust after they fail to meet runtime performance / operability targets.
Wasn't there a recent study from Google that came to the same conclusion? (They see improved productivity for Go with junior programmers that don't understand static typing, but then they can never actually stabilize the resulting codebase.)
One trade off is if the code for TS is no longer written in TS, that means the core team won’t be dogfooding TS day in and day out anymore, which might hurt devx in the long run. This is one of the failure modes that hurt Flow (written in OCaml), IMO. Curious how the team is thinking about this.
As a result the amount of libraries that ship flow types has absolutely dwindled over the years, and now typescript has completely taken over.
Yet projects inevitably get to the stage where a more native representation wins out. I mean, I can't think of a time a high profile project written in a lower level representation got ported to a higher level language.
It makes me think I should be starting any project I have in the lowest level representation that allows me some ergonomics. Maybe more reason to lean into Zig? I don't mean for places where something like Rust would be appropriate. I mean for anything I would consider using a "good enough" scripting language.
It honestly has me questioning my default assumption to use JS runtimes on the server (e.g. Node, deno, bun). I mean, the benefit of using the same code on the server/client has rarely if ever been a significant contributor to project maintainability for me. And it isn't that hard these days to spin up a web server with simple routing, database connectivity, etc. in pretty much any language including Zig or Go. And with LLMs and language servers, there is decreasing utility in familiarity with a language to be productive.
It feels like the advantages of scripting languages are being eroded away. If I am planning a career "vibe coding" or prompt engineering my way into the future, I wonder how reasonable it would be to assume I'll be doing it to generate lower level code rather than scripts.
Prisma is currently being rewritten from Rust to TypeScript: https://www.prisma.io/blog/rust-to-typescript-update-boostin...
> Yet projects inevitably get to the stage where a more native representation wins out.
I would be careful about extrapolating the performance gains achieved by the Go TypeScript port to non-compiler use cases. A compiler is perhaps the worst use case for a language like JS, because it is both (as Anders Hejlsberg refers to it) an "embarassingly parallel task" (because each source file can be parsed independently), but also requires the results of the parsing step to be aggregated and shared across multiple threads (which requires shared memory multithreading of AST objects). Over half of the performance gains can be attributed to being able to spin up a separate goroutine to parse each source file. Anders explains it perfectly here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlGza4oIleY&t=2027s
We might eventually get shared memory multithreading (beyond Array Buffers) in JS via the Structs proposal [1], but that remains to be seen.
[1] https://github.com/tc39/proposal-structs?tab=readme-ov-file
Software never gets rewritten in a higher level language, but software is constantly replaced by alternatives. First example that comes to mind is Discord, an Electron app that immediately and permanently killed every other voice client on the market when it launched.
What was that saying again? Premature optimisation is the root of all evil
The ergonomics of compiling your code for every combination of architecture and platform you plan to deploy to? It's not fun. I promise.
> my default assumption to use JS runtimes on the server
AWS Lambda has a minimum billing interval of 1ms. To do anything interesting you have to call other APIs which usually have a minimum latency of 5 to 30ms. You aren't buying much of anything in any scalable environment.
> there is decreasing utility in familiarity with a language to be productive.
I hope you aren't planning on making money from this code. Either way, have fun debugging that!
> the advantages of scripting languages are being eroded away.
As long as scripting languages have interfaces which let them access C libraries either directly or through compiled modules they will have strong advantages. Just having a CLI where you can test out ideas and check performance is massively powerful and I hate not having it in any compiled project. Go has particularly bad ergonomics here as writing test cases are easy but exploring ideas is not due to it's strictness down to even the code styling level.
The trade-off is that the team will have to start dealing with a lot of separate issues... How do tools like ESLint TS talk to TSC now? How to run this in playground? How to distribute the binaries? And they also lose out on the TS type system, which makes their Go version rely a little more on developer prowess.
This is an easy choice for one of the most fundamental tools underlaying a whole ecosystem, maintained by Microsoft and one of the developers of C# itself, full-time.
Other businesses probably want to focus on actually making money by leading their domain and easing long-term maintenance.
Just two years ago, a friend of mine described it as quite a hassle to get a RESTful backend running in Go. He got it working but it was more work than usual. Was he an outlier or have things been getting better in the framework department?
It won't happen tomorrow, but I am quite certain eventually it will be in a position where executables are generated directly, and we will enter into a new computation model.
Like you can nowadays still inspect the generated Assembly, and eventually fine tune it, our AI tools of the future might provide a similar approach.
The JS runtimes are fine for the majority of use cases but the ecosystem is really the issue IMO.
> the benefit of using the same code on the server/client has rarely if ever been a significant contributor to project maintainability for me
I agree and now with OpenAPI this is even less of an argument.
However, it is important not to conflate "scripting language" and "dynamic language" and "interpreted". While there is some correlation there, it is not a necessary one.
Objective-C is an example of a fast AOT-compiled pretty dynamic language, and WebScript was an interpreted scripting language with pretty much identical syntax and semantics.[2]
What do I mean with fast? In my experience, Objective-C can be extremely fast [3], though it can also be used very much like a scripting language and can also be used in ways that are as slow or even slower than popular scripting languages. That range is very interesting.
So I don't actually think the tradeoff you describe between low-level unergonomic fast and high-level ergonomic slow is a necessary one, and one of the goals of Objective-S is to prove that point.[4]
So far, it's looking very good. Basically, the richer ways of connecting components appear to allow fairly simple "scripted" connections to achieve reasonably high performance [5]. However, I now have a very simple AOT compiler (no optimizations whatsoever!) and that gives another factor 2.6 [6].
Steve Sinowsky wrote: "Does developer convenience really trump correctness, scalability, performance, separation of concerns, extensibility, and accidental complexity?"[7].
I am saying: how about we not have to choose?
And I'd much rather debug/modify semantically rich, high-level code that my LLM generated.
[1] https://blog.metaobject.com/2015/10/jitterdammerung.html
[2] https://blog.metaobject.com/2019/12/the-4-stages-of-objectiv...
[3] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321842847/ref=as_li_tl?ie...
[5] https://blog.metaobject.com/2021/07/deleting-code-to-double-...
[6] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689492.3690052
[7] https://darkcoding.net/research/IEEE-Convenience_Over_Correc...
1. https://github.com/dudykr/stc - Abandoned (https://github.com/swc-project/swc/issues/571#issuecomment-1...)
2. https://github.com/kaleidawave/ezno - In active development. Does not have the goal of 1:1 parity to tsc.
A compiled managed language is much better approach for userspace applications.
Pity that they didn't go with AOT compiled .NET, though.
Yeah. It seems to be unfashionable somewhat even within Microsoft.
(edit: it seems to be you and me and barely anyone else on HN advocating for C#)
I was trying ot push .net as our possible language for somehow high performance executables. Seeing this means I'll stop trying to advocate for it. If even this team doesn't believe in it.
This seems super petty to me. Like, if at the end of the day you get a binary that works on your OS and doesn’t require a runtime, why should you “love” that they picked one language over another? It’s exactly the same outcome for you as a user.
I mean, if you wanted to contribute to the project and you knew go better than rust, that would make sense. But sounds like you just don’t like rust because of… reasons, and you’re just glad to see rust “fail” for their use case.
ah, answers below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43333296
Not saying that in a judgemental way, I'm just genuinely surprised. What does this say about what Hejlsberg thinks of C# at the moment? I would assume one reason they don't pick C# is because it's deeply unpopular in the open source world. If Microsoft was so successful in making Typescript popular for open source work, why can't they do it for C#?
I have not opted to use C# for anything significant in the past decade or so. I am not 100% sure why, but there's always been something I'd rather use. Whether that's Go, Rust, Ruby or Haskell. I always enjoyed working in C#, I think it's a well designed and powerful language even if it never made the top of my list recently. I never considered that there might be something so fundamentally wrong with it that not even Hejlsberg himself would use it to build a Typescript compiler.
What's wrong with C#?
According to whom?
--https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-go/discussions/411
I haven't looked at the tsc codebase. I do currently use Golang at my job and have used TypeScript at a previous job several years ago.
I'm surprised to hear that idiomatic Golang resembles the existing coding patterns of the tsc codebase. I've never felt that idiomatic code in Golang resembled idiomatic code in TypeScript. Notably, sum types are commonly called out as something especially useful in writing compilers, and when I've wanted them in Golang I've struggled to replace them.
Is there something special about the existing tsc codebase, or does the statement about idiomatic Golang resembling the existing codebase something you could say about most TypeScript codebases?
To be fair, they didn't actually say that. What they said was that idiomatic Go resembles their existing patterns. I'd imagine what they mean by that is that a port from their existing patterns to Go is much closer to a mechanical 1:1 process than a port to Rust or C#. Rust is the obvious choice for a fully greenfield implementation, but reorganizing around idiomatic Rust patterns would be much harder for most programs that are not already written in a compatible style. e.g. For Rust programs, the precise ownership and transfer of memory needs to be modelled, whereas Go and JS are both GC'd and don't require this.
For a codebase that relies heavily on exception handling, I can imagine a 1:1 port would require more thought, but compilers generally need to have pretty good error recovery so I wouldn't be surprised if tsc has bespoke error handling patterns that defers error handling and passes around errors as values a lot; that would map pretty well to Go.
Most TypeScript projects are very far away from compiler code, so that this wouldn't resemble typical TypeScript isn't too surprising. Compilers written in Go also don't tend to resemble typical Go either, in fairness.
TSC doesn't use many union types, it's mostly OOP-ish down-casting or chains of if-statements.
One reason for this is I think performance; most objects are tagged by bitsets in order to pack more info about the object without needing additional allocations. But TypeScript can't really (ergonomically) represent this in the type system, so that means you don't get any real useful unions.
A lot of the objects are also secretly mutable (for caching/performance) which can make precise union types not very useful, since they can be easily invalidated by those mutations.
Why _not_ use Go?
Because of its truly primitive type system, and because Microsoft already has a much better language — C#, which is both faster and can be more high level and more low-level at the same time, depending on your needs.
I am a complete nobody to argue with the likes of Hejlsberg, but it feels like AOT performance problems could be solved if tsc needed it, and tsc adoption of C# would also help push C#/.NET adoption. Once again, Microsoft proves that it's a bunch of unrelated companies at odds with each other.
Never been a big fan of MS, but must say that typescript is well done imho. thanks for it and all the hard work!
(I'm simply not aware of them but that also means I won't make any statements about these)
I would argue it needs editing, as it violates the HN guideline:
> use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
Opened discussion [1]
- [0] https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-go/discussions/410
- [1] https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-go/discussions/467
https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-go/commits?after=dad...
../../../tmp/typescript-go/built/local/lib.dom.d.ts:27982:6 - error TS2300: Duplicate identifier 'KeyType'.
27982 type KeyType = "private" | "public" | "secret";
~~~~~~~
../../../tmp/typescript-go/built/local/lib.webworker.d.ts:9370:6 - 'KeyType' was also declared here.
9370 type KeyType = "private" | "public" | "secret";
~~~~~~~
Running it in another portion results in SIGSEGV with a bad/nil pointer defererence, which puts me in the camp of people questioning the choice of Go.
They would be still setting up the project, if it was Rust.
Why not find out what's going wrong and submit a bug report / merge request instead of immediately dismissing a choice made by one of the leading authorities in programming languages in the world?
Strange choice to use Go for the compiler instead of C# or F#.
Now if they will have problems, they will depend on the Go team at Google to fix them.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/go/
Just like they have their own Java distribution, after everything that caused C# to exist in first place,
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/java/
Yes, the new DevDiv is not like the Microsoft of old.
But then the .NET team shouldn't be asking every now and then on social media, why other languages get chosen, outside the Windows ecosytem.
The opposite would be true as well, teams at Google using Typescript or C# would rely on Microsoft to fix any issues.
Or collaborate with Go team.
MS literally already has a whole team around Go. And if they didn't, Go is completely open source.
C# is open-source in name only.
Hopefully this would also reduce the memory footprint because my VS Code intelisense keeps crashing unless I give it like 70% of my RAM, its probably because of our fairly large graphql.ts file which contains auto-generated grapqhl types.
This isn't a knock against Go or necessarily a promotion of Rust, just seems like a lot of duplicated effort. I don't know the timelines in place or where the community projects were vs. the internal MS project.
I kinda wonder, though, if in 5 or 10 years how many of these tools will still be crazy fast. Hopefully all of them! But I also would not be surprised if this new performance headroom is eaten away over time until things become only just bearable again (which is how I would describe the current performance of typescript).
Plus, using TS directly to do runtime validation of types will become a lot more viable without having to precompile anything. Not only serverside, we'll compile the whole thing to WASM and ship it to the client to do our runtime validation there.
> Bootstrapping is a fairly common practice when creating a programming language. Many compilers for many programming languages are bootstrapped, including compilers for ALGOL, BASIC, C, C#, Common Lisp, D, Eiffel, Elixir, Go, Haskell, Java, Modula-2, Nim, Oberon, OCaml, Pascal, PL/I, Python, Rust, Scala, Scheme, TypeScript, Vala, Zig and more.
My most plausible guess would be that compiler writers don't want to dig into native code and performance, writing a TS to Go translator looks like a more familiar task for them. Lack of JS version performance analysis anywhere in the announcements kinda confirms this.
Programming languages are tools. Nothing more.
It doesn't use type hints yet, and the difficulty there is that you'd need a sound type system in order to rely on the types. You may be able to use type hints to generate optimized and fallback functions, with type guards, but that doesn't exist yet and it sounds like the TypeScript team wants to move pretty quickly with this.
[1]: https://porffor.dev/
While I like faster TSC, I don't like that the TypeScript compiler needs to be written in another language to achieve speed; it kind of reminds everyone that TS isn't a good language for complicated CPU/IO tasks.
Given that the TypeScript team has resigned to the fact that JavaScript engines can't run the TypeScript compiler (TSC) sufficiently fast for foreseeable future and are rewriting it entirely in Go, then it is unlikely they will seek to do AOT.
> immutable data structures --> "we are fully concurrent, because these are what I often call embarrassingly parallelizable problems"
The relationship of their performance gains to functional programming ideas is explained beginning at 8:14 https://youtu.be/pNlq-EVld70?feature=shared&t=522
Also I get the sense from the video that it still outputs only JS. It would be nice if we could build typescript executables that didn't require that, even if was just WASM, though that is more of a different backend rather than a different compiler.
Edit: C# was addressed: https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-go/discussions/411#d...
> The JS-based codebase will continue development into the 6.x series, and TypeScript 6.0 will introduce some deprecations and breaking changes to align with the upcoming native codebase.
> While some projects may be able to switch to TypeScript 7 upon release, others may depend on certain API features, legacy configurations, or other constraints that necessitate using TypeScript 6. Recognizing TypeScript’s critical role in the JS development ecosystem, we’ll still be maintaining the JS codebase in the 6.x line until TypeScript 7+ reaches sufficient maturity and adoption.
It sounds like the Python 2 -> 3 migration, or the .Net Framework 4 -> .Net 5 (.Net Core) migration.
I'm still in a multi-year project to upgrade past .Net Framework 4; so I can certainly empathize with anyone who gets stuck on TS 6 for an extended period of time.
My theory - that Go will always be the choice for things like this when ease, simplicity, and good (but not absolute) performance is the goal - continues to hold.
And if it's run-time, can we expect browsers to replace V8 with this Go library?
(I realize this is a noob/naive question - apologies)
So, to me, Hejlsberg's choice sounds pretty logical.
After, why go ? why not...
Also, what’s up with 10x everywhere? Why not 9.5x or 11x?
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/announcing-typescr...
This will only allow you to run your TypeScript in Node, but does not perform type checking, and I don't believe has any plans to. This is from Node.js 23.9.0
https://nodejs.org/api/typescript.html#type-stripping
I don't believe Node has any plans for type checking TS.
> Modern editors like Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code have excellent performance.
Well I am not sure we are on the same page here. Still, fingers crossed.
See how many spaghetti types get churned through this faster transpiler.
Didn't expect Jevons paradox popping up for compilers.
If the Typescript team were to go with Rust or C# they would have to contend with async/await decoration and worry about starvation and monopolization.
Go frees the developer from worrying about these concerns.
There's a significant performance penalty for using javascript outside the browser.
I'm not aware of any JS runtime outside a browser that supports concurrency (other than concurrently awaiting IO), so you can't do parallel compilation in a single process.
It's generally also very difficult to make a JS program as fast as even a naive go program, and the performance tooling for go is dramatically more mature.
What is more important is that tsc does typechecking, which is a static analysis of sorts to ensure code correctness. But this has nothing to do with runtime performance, that's entirely in JS land and in JS transpilers / optimizers.
You seem to be referring to runtime performance of compiled code. The announcement is about compile times; it's about the performance of the compiler itself.
I've been revisiting my editing setup over the last 6 months and to my surprise I've time traveled back to 2012 and am once again really enjoying Sublime Text. It's still by far the most performant editor out there, on account of the custom UI toolkit and all the incredibly fast indexing/search/editing engines (everything's native).
Not sure how this announcement impacts VSCode's UI being powered by Electron, but having the indexing/search/editing engines implemented in Go should drastically improve my experience. The editor will never be as fast as Sublime but if they can make it fast enough to where I don't notice the indexing/search/editing lag in large projects/files, I'd probably switch back.
It has no bearing on this at all.
tl;dr — Rust would be great for a rewrite, but Go makes way more sense for a port. After the dust settles, I hope people focus on the outcomes, not the language choice.
I was very surprised to see that the TypeScript team didn’t choose Rust, not just because it seemed like an obvious technical choice but because the whole ecosystem is clearly converging on Rust _right now_ and has been for a while. I write Rust for my day job and I absolutely love Rust. TypeScript will always have such a special place in my heart but for years now, when I can use Rust.. I use Rust. But it makes a lot of sense to pick Go.
The key “reading between the lines” from the announcement is that they’re doing a port not a rewrite. That’s a very big difference on a complex project with 100-man-years poured into it.
Places where Go is a better fit than Rust when porting JavaScript:
- Go, like JavaScript and unlike Rust, is garbage collected. The TypeScript compiler relies on garbage collection in multiple places, and there are probably more that do but no one realizes it. It would be dangerous and very risky to attempt to unwind all of that. If it were a Rust rewrite, this problem goes away, but they’re not doing a rewrite.
- Rust is so stupidly hard. I repeat, I love Rust. Love it. But damn. Sometimes it feels like the Rust language actively makes decisions that demolish the DX of the 99.99% use-case if there’s a 0.001% use-case that would be slightly more correct. Go is such a dream compared to Rust in this respect. I know people that more-or-less learned Go in a weekend and are writing it professionally daily. I also know people that have been writing Rust every day professionally for years and say they still feel like noobs. It’s undeniable what a difference this makes on productivity for some teams.
Places where Go is just as good a fit as Rust:
- Go and Rust both have great parallelism/concurrency support. Go supports both shared memory (with explicit synchronization) and message-passing concurrency (via goroutines & channels). In JavaScript, multi-threading requires IPC with WebWorkers, making Go’s concurrency model a smoother fit for porting a JS-heavy codebase that assumes implicit shared state. Rust enforces strict ownership rules that disallows shared state, or we can at least say makes it a lot harder (by design, admittedly).
- Go and Rust both have great tooling. Sure, there are so many Rust JavaScript tools, but esbuild definitively proves that Go tooling can work. Heck, the TypeScript project itself uses esbuild today.
- Go and Rust are both memory safe.
- Go and Rust have lots of “zero (or near zero) cost abstractions” in their language surface. The current TypeScript compiler codebase makes great use of TypeScript enums for bit fiddling and packing boolean flags into a single int32. It sucks to deal with (especially with a Node debugger attached to the TypeScript typechecker). While Go structs are not literally zero cost, they’re going to be SO MUCH nicer than JavaScript objects for a use-case like this that’s so common in the current codebase. I think Rust sorta wins when it comes to plentiful abstractions, but Go has more than enough to make a huge impact.
Places where Rust wins:
- the Rust type system. no contest. In fairness, Go doesn’t try to have a fancy type system. It makes up for a lot of the DX I complained about above. When you get an error that something won’t compile, but only when targeting Windows because Rust understands the difference in file permissions… wow. But clearly, what Go has is good enough.
- so many new tools (basically, all of them that are not also in JS) are being done in Rust now. The alignment on this would have been cool. But hey, maybe this will force the bindings to be high-quality which benefits lots of other languages too (Zig type emitter, anyone?!).
By this time next week when the shock wears off, I just really hope what people focus on is that our TypeScript type checking is about to get 10 times faster. That’s such a big deal. I can’t even put it into words. I hope the TypeScript team is ready to be bombarded by people trying to use this TODAY despite them saying it’s just a preview, because there are some companies that are absolutely desperate to improve their editor perf and un-bottleneck their CI. I hope people recognize what a big move this is by the TypeScript team to set the project up for success for the next dozen years. Fully ejecting from being a self-hosted language is a BIG and unprecedented move!
Specifically if you race any non-trivial Go object (say, a hash table, or a string) then that's immediately UB. Internally what's happening is that these objects have internal consistency rules which you can easily break this way and they're not protected against that because the trivial way to do so is expensive. Writing a Go data race isn't as trivial as writing a use-after-free in C++ but it's not actually difficult to do by mistake.
In single threaded software this is no caveat at all, but most large software these days does have some threading involved.
Typescript is a Microsoft project, right? I’m surprised they didn’t choose C#.
Go doesn't seem to be memory safe, see https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/wbejky/comment/ii7ak8... and https://go.dev/play/p/3PBAfWkSue3
What? And how? And how would that help in Go which has a completely different garbage collection mechanism?
My development in regards to language:
- Javascript sucks I love Python.
- Python sucks I love Typescript.
Another commenter pointed out that compilers have very different performance characteristics to games, and I'll include web servers in that too.
tsc needs to start up fast and finish fast. There's not a ton of time to benefit from JIT.
Your server on the other hand will run for how long between deployments?
Right now you can make use of the --erasableSyntaxOnly to find any enums in your code, and start porting over to an alternative. This article lists alternatives if you're interested.
https://exploringjs.com/tackling-ts/ch_enum-alternatives.htm...
as i see next planned feature is macro in TS(joke, just because 3rd book is macro).
I'll give Typescript yet another go. I really like it and wish I could use it. It's just that any project I start, inevitably the sourcemap chain will go wrong and I lose the ability to run the debugger in any meaningful way.
Do any other well-adopted tools in the ecosystem use Go?
sigh
"To meet those goals, we’ve begun work on a native port of the TypeScript compiler and tools. The native implementation will drastically improve editor startup, reduce most build times by 10x, and substantially reduce memory usage."
Why not C#? https://youtu.be/10qowKUW82U?t=1155
/s
half of the perf gain is from moving to native code, other half is from concurrency
10x faster compilation, not runtime performance
Why is typescript not already a standard natively supported by browers?!
This is an admission that these JavaScript based languages (including TypeScript) are just completely unsuitable for these performance and scalable situations, especially when the codebase scales.
As long as it is a compiled language with reasonable performance and with proper memory management situations, Go is the unsurprising choice, but the wise choice to solve this problem.
But this choice definitively shows (and as admitted by the TS team) how immature both JavaScript and TypeScript are in performance and scalability scenarios and should be absolutely avoided for building systems that need it. Especially in the backend.
Just keep it in the frontend.