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Comments (105)

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  JoeDohn
  Vercel sloping it's way to clout again, they do this every month or so, clearly they want to stay in the news and some how credible and relevant.I can't think of any serious company or project that would use this thing.P.S: I just checked the contributors list, I have the utmost respect to them (notably simonw), but clearly this code is claude'ish but it is not among the contributor which makes it even more suspect.
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  acmnrs
  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.
• piterrro
  this is enough to keep them on the first page of HN and similar services. Its a growth strategy: invest tokens, build some "nice" project nobody wants, get some reach through publishment. Rinse and repeat.Heads up, in 12 months from now, 90% of open source projects will be vibecoded, without actual users - only looking "interesting" (if not already?).Its easy to vibe code a full blown compiler these days, the question is: will it be maintained? A catchy title is not enough to get sticky users, long term maintenance, community around the project is (or at least used to be).Having said that, the only viable reason for these kind of projects I see is getting attention for a moment, boosting reach of Vercel logo across the web and then disappearing (or stop development).If Vercel would think seriously about this project: they would show skin in the game - for example implement it as their own experimental runtime.
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  sheept
  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/
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  weinzierl
  It's nice they acknowledge and confirm the need for small, fast native executables.Having followed the story for this in Java over the decades I'm skeptical about the practicality. GCJ existed in the 90s and the technology was good, but there was no ecosystem support.After many small steps between GraalVM Native finally tackled the problem more holistically and the ecosystem followed. All the major libraries and frameworks put effort into being GraalVM compatible.And, still it's a major pain to make even simple existing applications run flawlessly natively.I'm glad something like scriptc exists but I'm afraid until this is of practical use it will be s long thorny way.
• notsylver
  I desperately want to see some of these projects used in production by the companies or people making them, at best it might prove that it isn't just a sloppy publicity stunt
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  elendilm
  This look very promising.We are increasingly using a subset of typescript in our backend so as to be amenable to a tool, in the long run, which can convert the ts subset to rust source code.This project will enable an alternative of that vision earlier - except of course without the parallelism.Also I am curious as to whether this will compile to a static lib which can be linked to an existing cpp app to be run on android/ios targets. In theory it should be able to. The docs mention ffi, but I didn't dig deep.
• localhoster
  Funny to see vercel is loosing all credibility under the influence of AI. Never liked their products anyway, so I believe it's a net positive for the industry :)
• anon
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  chilipepperhott
  It's difficult to ignore how the README is filled with Claudisms.
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  satvikpendem
  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.
• hnsmomdpvp
  Not glamorous but it works
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  ianberdin
  I've heard stories like this before, how one or a few people miraculously coded up an alternative to Node.js. But can you name even one that actually works properly in production? Not a single one.Take Bun, for example. Nobody is actually running it in production as a runtime. Why? Memory leaks and a whole bunch of other issues. I've personally tried it multiple times, and something always breaks. Come on, it's just not that simple.Sure, you can build something that has similar interfaces and even works to some degree. But making a production-ready solution is a completely different level of complexity. There's that well-known chart where the first 90% of implementation happens almost instantly, and the remaining 10% takes forever to polish out all the rough edges.On one hand, I really like the idea, and I've always wondered why TypeScript doesn't compile to native code. On the other hand, I'm quite skeptical that Vercel can actually pull this off. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I have very little faith in it.Either way, good luck to them, but honestly, even if they succeed, I probably won't use it. Knowing their track record with vendor lock-in and Next.js, where they do everything possible to push you onto Vercel Cloud — no thanks.
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  anta40
  Does this mean I can turn my JS-based backend into single executable and easily ship it, like in Go?
• MrDrMcCoy
  Hasn't quickjs and GraalVM been able to do this for a while now?Also, does "Linux and Windows binaries build by cross-compilation" mean that you can't run it on non-MacOS? If so, that's pretty lame...
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  aabhay
  178kb?! What are you putting in there, a JVM?
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  pdantix
  another vercel labs thing that's been slopped together, hyped up on twitter and then left to be forgotten about in a few months time.
• khalic
  Does it compiles to C? Wasm? I couldn’t find it the readme slop
• casper14
  I like the idea.
• relug
  finally someone did this
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  xiaodai
  how can you compile it if javascript is a valid subset of typescript? confused.
• techpression
  Whatever happened with their new programming language for agents? I expect this will follow the same path.
• truth_seeker
  Shameless plug but worth reading :I have forked Fabrice Bellards QuickJS and extended it heavily to adopt anti-npm/node stance.all of the essential standard lib and top npm packages will be built natively in C17 with every build and minor release focred through CPU, IO and memory profiling.Currently it supports MacOS and Linux, FreeBSD and Windows in future.https://github.com/corporatepiyush/dynascriptAPI reference : https://github.com/corporatepiyush/dynascript/blob/master/do...
• anon
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  zuzululu
  this is interesting , so i can turn electron into a native app now?whats the use case for this , make it hard to reverse engineer my node projects?
• anon
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