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A 10x Faster TypeScript

devblogs.microsoft.com

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Re: A 10x Faster TypeScript

#61

Post by tinco »

pjmlp wrote: post #12

Even though I have my considerations regarding Go, I love that they picked Go instead of the fashion to go Rust that seems to be the norm now. A compiled managed language is much better approach for userspace applications. Pity that they didn't go with AOT compiled .NET, though.

It's not just a pity, it's very surprising. In my eyes Go is a direct competitor of C#. Whenever you pick Go for a project, C# should have been a serious consideration. Hejlsberg designed C# and that a team that he's an authority figure in would opt to use Go, a language which frankly I would not consider to build a compiler in is astounding.

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#?

Re: A 10x Faster TypeScript

#62

Post by Etheryte »

pseudopersonal wrote: post #8

The post title is a bit misleading. It should say a 10x faster build time, or a 10x faster TypeScript compiler . tsc (compiler) is 10x faster, but not the final TS program runtime. Still an amazing feat! But doom will not run faster "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…

I don't think it's misleading at all, because you can't run Typescript. Typescript is either compiled, transpiled or stripped down into another language and that's what gets run in the end.

Re: A 10x Faster TypeScript

#63

Post by tgv »

pjmlp wrote: post #16
DanRosenwasser wrote: post #3

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.

Why not AOT compiled C#, given the team's historical background?

Not involved, but there's a faq in their repo, and this answers your question, perhaps, a bit: https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-go/discussions/411

Re: A 10x Faster TypeScript

#64

Post by AshleysBrain »

DanRosenwasser wrote: post #3

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.

Well-optimized JavaScript can get to within about 1.5x the performance of C++ - something we have experience with having developed a full game engine in JavaScript [1]. Why is the TypeScript team moving to an entirely different technology instead of working on optimizing the existing TS/JS codebase?

[1] https://www.construct.net/en

Re: A 10x Faster TypeScript

#65

Post by rvz »

So in order to get "Faster TypeScript" you have to port the existing "transpiler" in a complied language that delivers said faster performance.

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.

Re: A 10x Faster TypeScript

#66

Post by DanRosenwasser »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #23
DanRosenwasser wrote: post #3

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.

What is the forward paths available for efforts like the TS Playground under Typescript 7 (native)? 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+?

We anticipate that we will eventually get a playground working on the new native codebase. We know we'll likely compile down to WebAssembly, but a lot of how it gets integrated will depend on what the API looks like. We're currently giving a lot of thought to that, but we have good ideas. https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-go/discussions/455

Re: A 10x Faster TypeScript

#67

Post by adriancooney »

I know this is a port but I really hope the team builds in performance debugging tools from the outset. Being able to understand _why_ a build or typecheck is taking so long is sorely missing from today's Typescript.

Re: A 10x Faster TypeScript

#68

Post by jchw »

grantwu wrote: post #50

> By far the most important aspect is that we need to keep the new codebase as compatible as possible, both in terms of semantics and in terms of code structure. We expect to maintain both codebases for quite some time going forward. Languages that allow for a structurally similar codebase offer a significant boon for anyone making code changes because we can easily port changes between the two codebases. In contrast…

> 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.

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.

Re: A 10x Faster TypeScript

#69

Post by slackerIII »

This is amazing. Everyone that picked TS for a big project was effectively betting that someone would do this at some point, so it's incredible to see it finally happen. Thanks to everyone involved!

Re: A 10x Faster TypeScript

#70

Post by DanRosenwasser »

umvi wrote: post #34
DanRosenwasser wrote: post #3

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.

Since the new tsc is written in go, will I be able to pull it into my go web server as a middleware to dynamically transpile ts?

We'll be working on an API that ideally can be used through any language - that would be our preferred means of consuming the new codebase.
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