Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Would you pay for 100x faster TypeScript type checker?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–19 of 19 posts

Re: Ask HN: Would you pay for 100x faster TypeScript type checker?

#11

Post by molszanski »

mohsen1 wrote: post #8

Where I worked full TypeScript compilation in the monorepo would take an hour or more. But that would be kinda rare. Using project references and heavy CI caching and remote caching we were able to type-check parts of the repo with confidence, so IDEs were performant in multi-million-line TypeScript repo. This is a very likely customer of what you're offering but I doubt it would be an easy sell. Specially that there…

I would pipe a faster checker as a first fail fast local and CI. I want a CI to fail fast but in the end I want it to be correct before production release

Re: Ask HN: Would you pay for 100x faster TypeScript type checker?

#12

Post by mohsen1 »

molszanski wrote: post #11
mohsen1 wrote: post #8

Where I worked full TypeScript compilation in the monorepo would take an hour or more. But that would be kinda rare. Using project references and heavy CI caching and remote caching we were able to type-check parts of the repo with confidence, so IDEs were performant in multi-million-line TypeScript repo. This is a very likely customer of what you're offering but I doubt it would be an easy sell. Specially that there…

I would pipe a faster checker as a first fail fast local and CI. I want a CI to fail fast but in the end I want it to be correct before production release

tsc caches the interface of projects so when a project is not changed, its not compiled.

see https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/project-referen...

Re: Ask HN: Would you pay for 100x faster TypeScript type checker?

#13

Post by curtisblaine »

I'd pay for a 100x faster TypeScript parser / compiler with full AST access like https://ts-morph.com/ (that uses `tsc` under the hood, iirc). For just the typechecking part, no (I don't know if you can write a typechecker without going to AST, though).

Re: Ask HN: Would you pay for 100x faster TypeScript type checker?

#15

Post by 999900000999 »

No.

Realistically you'll need to keep updating this. This means a one time payment won't cut it.

So the question becomes, will I pay 10$ a month for it.

Now if you could ship a better VS Code, not just a lazy fork, but something truly amazing, maybe I'd pay 10$ a month for that. It would need to be magic. Something to detect how projects should work. Help me with the 9000 different ways to configure a node js project , etc.

I don't think you could hope to do this with a team of less than 10 or so....

Re: Ask HN: Would you pay for 100x faster TypeScript type checker?

#16

Post by fragmede »

What randoms on the Internet think isn't useful to you, unless you want to make it your business a business-to-developer (B2D, a subset of B2C) company. Those tend to be difficult (difficult != impossible) as developers are cheap and don't efficiently time optimize. (https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:735/1*6Oyig2ACF-unC3R-...) Pricing is a dark art and not very scientific. it's not just take the cost to make the product and give yourself a profit margin and you're done. there's some advice at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26553639 has a bit

Who you want to ask is though is people on developer productivity teams at large companies that have the budget to spend $10,000+ per year on a tool that will save the company > $10,000 (or whatever number you can justify using some back of the envelope math based on how often the checker needs to run how much faster yours is and how much that would save an organization with N developers.

B2B sales is difficult for a traditional software engineer (that would write such a tool in the first place to do) to do alone though, so you may want to seek outside help.

Re: Ask HN: Would you pay for 100x faster TypeScript type checker?

#17

Post by molszanski »

mohsen1 wrote: post #12
molszanski wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would pipe a faster checker as a first fail fast local and CI. I want a CI to fail fast but in the end I want it to be correct before production release

tsc caches the interface of projects so when a project is not changed, its not compiled. see https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/project-referen...

Yup yup, I know, but requires a lot of setup on CI. We are using project references btw. They are very cool

Re: Ask HN: Would you pay for 100x faster TypeScript type checker?

#18

Post by primering »

fragmede wrote: post #16

What randoms on the Internet think isn't useful to you, unless you want to make it your business a business-to-developer (B2D, a subset of B2C) company. Those tend to be difficult (difficult != impossible) as developers are cheap and don't efficiently time optimize. ( https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:735/1*6Oyig2ACF-unC3R-... ) Pricing is a dark art and not very scientific. it's not just take the cost to make th…

you are probably right, but you know it's just that I really want to have a crazy fast typescript checker myself but can not justify the work when I know either nobody else will use it or those who use it steal my time without giving anything ($) back

Re: Ask HN: Would you pay for 100x faster TypeScript type checker?

#19

Post by fragmede »

primering wrote: post #18
fragmede wrote: post #16

What randoms on the Internet think isn't useful to you, unless you want to make it your business a business-to-developer (B2D, a subset of B2C) company. Those tend to be difficult (difficult != impossible) as developers are cheap and don't efficiently time optimize. ( https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:735/1*6Oyig2ACF-unC3R-... ) Pricing is a dark art and not very scientific. it's not just take the cost to make th…

you are probably right, but you know it's just that I really want to have a crazy fast typescript checker myself but can not justify the work when I know either nobody else will use it or those who use it steal my time without giving anything ($) back

both those possibilities are there, but there's also the third possibility where you make this thing that there's clearly a need for and it saves time/money, and you sell it for money, and you get rich.
Post reply on HN