Scriptc by Vercel: TypeScript-to-Native compiler, no JavaScript engine in binary

acmnrs•about 2 hours ago

Porforr<https://porffor.dev> has been working towards the same goal for a while. The creator, CanadaHonk<https://honk.foo>, is extremely talented and the project still only passes ~68% of Test262. I'm more than a little suspicious of how Vercel has made so much progress so fast, unless I'm misunderstanding the scope of this project.

simonw•about 2 hours ago

> I'm more than a little suspicious of how Vercel has made so much progress so fast

Coding agents. They landed 918,000 lines of code in a single week: https://github.com/vercel-labs/scriptc/graphs/contributors?s...

acmnrs•about 2 hours ago

That makes sense. It also seems like this uses a lot more dependencies and tiers of compilation whereas Porforr is trying to do everything from scratch.

pizlonator•about 2 hours ago

That explains why:

- the architecture is idiotic.

- they have zero credible perf numbers.

I plan to benchmark it using generally accepted methods.

Porffor makes careful trade offs that make sense and is benchmarked in a way that I can believe.

(Source: I make dynamic languages fast for a living)

bbor•about 2 hours ago

Putting aside the whole “team of professionals putting out a product vs solo dev fine tuning their opus” of it all:

Can you clarify what about the architecture is ‘idiotic’? Not trying to catch you or demand a defense, just looking for a vague description. I don’t even know how to start examining the architecture of something like this.

sheept•about 2 hours ago

One of the strengths of TypeScript besides its expressiveness is that it's compatible with the massive npm ecosystem. Most packages only ship untyped JavaScript with type declarations defining the interface,[0] so realistically you'd still need a JavaScript engine if you use any packages.

But if you're starting from scratch and know you won't be using any npm packages, you might as well use AssemblyScript.[2]

[0]: Publishing packages in TypeScript is explicitly discouraged by Node[1]. TypeScript isn't backwards compatible even in minor releases, and its compiler settings aren't portable for packages.

[1]: https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/main/doc/api/typescript....

[2]: https://www.assemblyscript.org/

simonw•about 2 hours ago

> so realistically you'd still need a JavaScript engine if you use any packages.

Looks like Scriptc's solution to that problem is that it can optionally bundle a 620KB quickjs-ng JavaScript engine if you have dependencies that need to be executed that way.

bbor•about 2 hours ago

Those are good reasons to publish untyped libraries as a rule, sure. But the contention that those reasons outweigh the value of types kinda boggles the mind, ngl!

satvikpendem•about 2 hours ago

A lot of people are trying this now with AI, a native TypeScript compiler, for example https://github.com/PerryTS/pry. It's a compelling value proposition, TypeScript is already well typed and barring a few cases it can be turned into machine code without a JS runtime.

chilipepperhott•about 2 hours ago

It's difficult to ignore how the README is filled with Claudisms.

simonw•about 2 hours ago

Looks like PRs are actively accepted. I just got rid of one of them! https://github.com/vercel-labs/scriptc/commit/c4b68dc6d9c259...

asdfsa32•about 1 hour ago

This is like putting lipstick on a pig. Give me an AI written README or tests but actually thoughtful codebase over human written readme but aislop code any day of the month

binary132•about 1 hour ago

Perhaps they should be left as a warning to others.

hakcermani•28 minutes ago

> macOS arm64 is the primary platform; Linux and Windows binaries build by cross-compilation

wish it was the other way around

aabhay•about 2 hours ago

178kb?! What are you putting in there, a JVM?

xiaodai•about 2 hours ago

how can you compile it if javascript is a valid subset of typescript? confused.

panzi•about 1 hour ago

Either it is only accepting a subset of TypeScript, or it is still interpreting the parts that don't have enough types. Given other comments here it sounds like the later.

casper14•about 2 hours ago

I like the idea.

Scriptc by Vercel: TypeScript-to-Native compiler, no JavaScript engine in binary

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