esbuild doesn't rely on TypeScript at all, so there's no issue there.

With tsdown on the other hand, it depends on if you use --isolatedDeclarations. If not, you can install TypeScript 6 side-by-side (instructions for this are on the blog)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48833715

Points: 720

# Comments: 301

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48586001

Points: 82

# Comments: 19

Unfortunately it has continued to make the rounds for about a decade now and gets re-posted every year or so.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47852567

Points: 19

# Comments: 1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47491794

Points: 49

# Comments: 1

We (TypeScript) used to do this for Visual Studio prior to tmLanguage. It was nice because we didn't have to write a second parser. Our parser was already error-tolerant and incremental, and syntax highlighting just involved descending into the syntax tree's tokens. So there was no room for divergence bugs in parsers, and there was also no need to figure out how to encode oddities and ambiguity-breaking logic in limited formats like tmLanguage.

This all predated TSServer (which predated LSP, though that's coming in TypeScript 7). The latency for syntax highlighting over JSON was too much, and other editors often didn't make syntax highlighting available outside of tmLanguage anyway. Eventually semantic highlighting became a thing, which is more latency-tolerant, and overlays colors on top of a syntactic highlighter in VS Code.

The other issue with this approach was that we still needed a dedicated thread just for fast syntax highlighting. That thread was a separate instance of the JS language service without anything shared, so that was a decent amount of memory overhead just for syntax highlighting.

- through builds (https://www.npmjs.com/package/@typescript/native-preview), or

- through the editor extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=TypeScri...)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46123921

Points: 100

# Comments: 37

____

Language choice is always a hot topic! We extensively evaluated many language options, both recently and in prior investigations. We also considered hybrid approaches where certain components could be written in a native language, while keeping core typechecking algorithms in JavaScript. We wrote multiple prototypes experimenting with different data representations in different languages, and did deep investigations into the approaches used by existing native TypeScript parsers like swc, oxc, and esbuild. To be clear, many languages would be suitable in a ground-up rewrite situation. Go did the best when considering multiple criteria that are particular to this situation, and it's worth explaining a few of them.

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, languages that require fundamental rethinking of memory management, mutation, data structuring, polymorphism, laziness, etc., might be a better fit for a ground-up rewrite, but we're undertaking this more as a port that maintains the existing behavior and critical optimizations we've built into the language. Idiomatic Go strongly resembles the existing coding patterns of the TypeScript codebase, which makes this porting effort much more tractable.

Go also offers excellent control of memory layout and allocation (both on an object and field level) without requiring that the entire codebase continually concern itself with memory management. While this implies a garbage collector, the downsides of a GC aren't particularly salient in our codebase. We don't have any strong latency constraints that would suffer from GC pauses/slowdowns. Batch compilations can effectively forego garbage collection entirely, since the process terminates at the end. In non-batch scenarios, most of our up-front allocations (ASTs, etc.) live for the entire life of the program, and we have strong domain information about when "logical" times to run the GC will be. Go's model therefore nets us a very big win in reducing codebase complexity, while paying very little actual runtime cost for garbage collection.

We also have an unusually large amount of graph processing, specifically traversing trees in both upward and downward walks involving polymorphic nodes. Go does an excellent job of making this ergonomic, especially in the context of needing to resemble the JavaScript version of the code.

Acknowledging some weak spots, Go's in-proc JS interop story is not as good as some of its alternatives. We have upcoming plans to mitigate this, and are committed to offering a performant and ergonomic JS API. We've been constrained in certain possible optimizations due to the current API model where consumers can access (or worse, modify) practically anything, and want to ensure that the new codebase keeps the door open for more freedom to change internal representations without having to worry about breaking all API users. Moving to a more intentional API design that also takes interop into account will let us move the ecosystem forward while still delivering these huge performance wins.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43332830

Points: 1827

# Comments: 907

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39819625

Points: 3

# Comments: 0