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It’s not obvious from the text, but the compiler was previously written in TypeScript (which was kind of a strange choice for the language to write a compiler in).
Bootstraping compilers is a common activity and TypeScript is a nice language.
Hi folks, Daniel Rosenwasser from the TypeScript team here. We're obviously very excited to announce this! RyanCavanaugh (our dev lead) and I are around to answer any quick questions you might have. You can also tune in to the Discord AMA mentioned in the blog this upcoming Thursday.
Go is quite difficult to embed in other applications due to the runtime. 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?
It’s not obvious from the text, but the compiler was previously written in TypeScript (which was kind of a strange choice for the language to write a compiler in).
Its not strange, its very common. Its called "bootstrapping". > 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. https://en.…
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I think the Wasm backends for both Golang and LLVM have yet to support the Wasm GC extension, which would likely be needed for anything like real parity with JS. The present approach is effectively including a full GC implementation alongside your actual Golang code and running that within the Wasm linear memory array, which is not a very sensible approach.
Yeah. If I remember it correctly, you need to compile the GC to run on WASM if the GC extension is not supported.
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Go is quite difficult to embed in other applications due to the runtime. 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?
Golang is actually pretty easy to embed into JS/TS via wasm. See esbuild.
yes, this will definitely vastly increase the Doom fps, haha (I’m the guy that did that project). But I think there’s a lot more to it than that. 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…
> Go and Rust are both memory safe. 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
Rust is memory safe. Go is memory safe. Python is memory safe. Typescript is memory safe. C++ is not memory safe. C is not memory safe.
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> Go and Rust are both memory safe. 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
That is not a violation of memory safety, that's a violation of concurrency safety, which Go doesn't promise (and of course, Rust does.)
That said, most people still call Go memory safe even in spite of this being possible, because, well, https://go.dev/ref/mem
> While programmers should write Go programs without data races, there are limitations to what a Go implementation can do in response to a data race. An implementation may always react to a data race by reporting the race and terminating the program. Otherwise, each read of a single-word-sized or sub-word-sized memory location must observe a value actually written to that location (perhaps by a concurrent executing goroutine) and not yet overwritten. These implementation constraints make Go more like Java or JavaScript, in that most races have a limited number of outcomes, and less like C and C++, where the meaning of any program with a race is entirely undefined, and the compiler may do anything at all.
That last sentence is the most important part. Java in particular specifically defines that tears may happen in a similar fashion, see 17.6 and 17.7 of https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se8/html/jls-17.htm...
I believe that most JVMs implement dynamic dispatch in a similar manner to C++, that is, classes are on the heap, and have a vtable pointer inside of them. Whereas Go's interfaces can work like Rust's trait objects, where they're a pair of (data pointer, vtable pointer). So the behavior we see here with Go is unlikely to be possible in Java, because the tear wouldn't corrupt the vtable pointer, because it's inside what's pointed at by the initial pointer, rather than being right after it in memory.
These bugs do happen, but they have a more limited blast radius than ones in languages that are clearly unsafe, and so it feels wrong to lump Go in with them even though in some strict sense you may want to categorize it the other way.