Javascript is not slow because of GC or JIT (the JVM is about twice as fast in benchmarks; Go has a GC) but because JS as a language is not designed for performance. Despite all the work that V8 does it cannot perform enough analysis to recover desirable performance. The simplest example to explain is the lack of machine numbers (e.g. ints). JS doesn't have any representation for this so V8 does a lot of work to try to figure out when a number can be represented as an int, but it won't catch all cases.
As for "working solution over language politics" you are entirely pulling that out of thin air. It's not supported by the article in any way. There is discussion at https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-go/discussions/411 that mentions different points.
I wonder if Typescript could introduce integer type(s) that a direct TS -> native code compiler (JIT or AOT) could use. Since TS becomes valid JS if all type annotations are removed, such numbers would just become normal JS numbers from the POV of a JS runtime which does not understand TS.
No, it is not. It is a continuation of an existing trend
You may be interested in esbuild (https://github.com/evanw/esbuild), turborepo (https://github.com/vercel/turborepo), biome-js (https://github.com/biomejs/biome) are all native reimplementations of existing projects in JS/TS. esbuild is written in Go, the others in Rust.
> reveals something deeper: Microsoft prioritized shipping a working solution over language politics
Its not that "deep". I don't see the politics either way, there are clearly successful projects using both Go and Rust. The only people who see "politics" are those who see people disagreeing, are unable to understand the substance of the disagreement and decide "ah, it's just politics".
So, I don't think the comment is AI-generated for this reason.
They're using en-dash which is even easier: option-hyphen.
This is the wrong way to do AI detection. For one, LLM would have used the right dash. But at least find someone wasting our time with belabored or overwrought text that doesn't even interact with anything.
In the pre-Unicode days, people would use two hyphens (--) to simulate em dashes.
I'm not sure that this is particularly accurate for the Rust case. The goal of this project was to perform a 1:1 port from TypeScript to a faster language. The existing codebase assumes a garbage collector so Rust is not really a realistic option here. I would bet they picked GCed languages only.
From https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-go/discussions/411
> Idiomatic Go strongly resembles the existing coding patterns of the TypeScript codebase, which makes this porting effort much more tractable.
> We also have an unusually large amount of graph processing, specifically traversing trees in both upward and downward walks involving polymorphic nodes. Go does an excellent job of making this ergonomic, especially in the context of needing to resemble the JavaScript version of the code.
Personally, I'm a big believer in choosing the right language for the job. C# is a great language, and often is "good enough" for many jobs. (I've done it for 20 years.) That doesn't mean it's always the best choice for the job. Likewise, sometimes picking a "familiar language" for a target audience is better than picking a personal favorite.
But, the team posted their rationale for Go here: https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-go/discussions/411
I hope you really mean for "userspace tools / programs" which is what these dev-tools are, and not in the area of device drivers, since that is where "systems programming" is more relevant.
I don't know why one would choose JS or TS for "systems programming", but I'm assuming you're talking about user-space programs.
But really, those who know the difference between a compiled language and a VM-based language know the obvious fundamental performance limitations of developer tools written in VM-based languages like JS or TS and would avoid them as they are not designed for this use case.
I don't follow. If they had picked Rust over Go why couldn't you also argue that they are prioritising shipping a working solution over language politics. It seems like a meaningless statement.
There is already a growing number of native-code tools of the JS/TS ecosystem, like esbuild or swc.
Maybe we should expect attempts of native AOT compilation for TS itself, to run on the server side, much like C# has an AOC native-code compiler.
This should prevent most of the memory safety issues, though data races could still be tricky (e.g. Go is memory unsafe due to data races)
I think they went for Go mostly because of memory management, async and syntactic similarity to interpreted languages which makes total sense for a port.
Really is this a surprise to anyone? I don't think anyone thinks JS is suitable for 'systems programming'.
Javascript is the language we have for the browser - there's no value in debating it's merits when it's the only option. Javascript on the server has only ever accrued benefits from being the same language as the browser.
