Motivating Question

tsc tends to be the bottleneck in modern TS toolchains. Native compilers like esbuild and swc are amazing, but they don’t perform type-checking, so you still need tsc as part of your build process.

Would it be possible to speed up tsc by opaquely compiling it from a JIT’ed JavaScript program into some more optimal format like WASM or native?

Notes

• The author of swc, kdy1dev is working on porting tsc to Go in order to remove the need for tsc in many cases.
• Evan Wallace’s take
• This may not be worth the effort, but seeing as how quickly native compilers gained adoption within the TS ecosystem, a similar solution for replacing the type-checking and generation portions of tsc would have huge implications.

Projects

tyty

• ‣
  • TypeScript-like language for WebAssembly
• Static TypeScript
• https://github.com/Shopify/javy
  • JavaScript to WebAssembly toolchain
  • Run your JavaScript on WebAssembly. Javy takes your JavaScript code, and executes it in a WebAssembly embedded JavaScript runtime.
• https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer
  • The leading WebAssembly Runtime supporting WASI and Emscripten
  • Run any code on any client — with WebAssembly and Wasmer
• https://github.com/WebAssembly/binaryen
  • Compiler infrastructure and toolchain library for WebAssembly
• https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime
  • Standalone JIT-style runtime for WebAssembly, using Cranelift
• https://github.com/vercel/ncc
  • Compile a Node.js project into a single file. Supports TypeScript, binary addons, dynamic requires.
• https://github.com/bytenode/bytenode
  • Minimalist bytecode compiler for Node.js
• https://github.com/evanw/thinscript
  • A low-level programming language inspired by TypeScript
• Related
  • https://github.com/NectarJS/nectarjs
    • JavaScript native compiler. No bytecode no VM, just pure native binaries
  • https://github.com/ballercat/walt
    • A JavaScript-like syntax for WebAssembly text format
  • https://github.com/zertosh/v8-compile-cache
    • Require hook for automatic V8 compile cache persistence