stc

For previous attempts at a faster tsc, but in rust, see: 1. https://github.com/dudykr/stc - Abandoned (https://github.com/swc-project/swc/issues/571#issuecomment-1...) 2. https://github.com/kaleidawave/ezno - In active development. Does not have the goal of 1:1 parity to tsc.

There are some external projects that have tried to port tsc to native. stc[0], for instance, was one. Iirc it started out in Go since it had a more comparable type system (they both use duck typing) making it easier to do one-to-one conversions of code from one language to the other. I’m not totally sure why it ended up pivoting to rust. [0]: https://github.com/dudykr/stc

I wish the TypeScript team can actually make a good and fast compiler with type inference support. There are so many opportunities for minimization, optimization, conditional builds, instrumentation, and so on if we can utilize the type info from the TypeScript compiler. Unfortunately the TypeScript team never commit to requests like these, and only commit to idiomatic JavaScript transpilation.[1][2] And because TypeScript is so complex and development is so heavy, third party attempts on making a type checker have never succeeded.[3] I'm curious how far React Compiler can go without the access to TypeScript type info, and if they would invest in compiler tooling for TypeScript in the future. But considering Meta has Flow as their in-house alternative to TypeScript, they might not have the incentive in investing in the TypeScript ecosyste

Wonder no more: https://github.com/dudykr/stc Written in Rust by the (lead?) dev of SWC --- SWC (speedy web compiler) compiles TS to JS STC (speedy type checker) checks TS types

The analogy (by swc's author) would be https://github.com/dudykr/stc

Note that there’s at least one TypeScript type checker being developed in Rust by a third party: https://github.com/dudykr/stc

>If we could push JavaScript performance to be another order of magnitude faster And it would speed up the TypeScript Compiler. My bet is: TypeScript typechecker in Rust: https://github.com/dudykr/stc

typescript(tsc) is the only one that does type checking. bun, deno, esbuild, swc etc. can parse the syntax, but they chuck the TS (they probably don't even add it to the AST, but I haven't checked). Keeping up with syntax is very doable. It doesn't change often, and updating the parser when it does isn't much work. There are some past/ongoing projects[1][2] to create type checkers faster than tsc, but they aren't going to reach full parity and probably don't plan on keeping up with language features. [1] https://github.com/dudykr/stc [2] https://github.com/marcj/TypeRunner

The author of swc is currently working on a Rust-port of the type checker: https://github.com/dudykr/stc Here is an interview with them: https://www.totaltypescript.com/rewriting-typescript-in-rust

It is popular in newgen tooling but I feel its more a function of the slowness of `tsc` than anything else. I get why `tsc` is slow, and have a lot of respect for the team and the constraints they work under but I can't help but feeling if we were to get a faster type checker (potentially `stc` from the creator of `swc` which also does this? https://github.com/dudykr/stc), this choice would be less popular. However if I'm honest I don't know if TypeScript's type system means that there are some natural constraints on how fast it can be validated.

Repository: https://github.com/dudykr/stc