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.
I get so irritated every time Claude says "honest". Anthropic talks about how they specifically engineer for it to be "honest". I'm convinced they're just measuring how many times it says the word honest instead.
Also the same vibe-code leader as zerolang, "The Programming Language for Agents" which Vercel launched with much fanfare in May, landed 1200 commits and then stopped ~mid-June.
Kind of funny seeing a serious (?), grown up, for-profit company acting the same way as my scatterbrain clinging into this month's fascination. Luckily, most of my things never see the light of day, so they don't get referenced a month later in a HN burn when I publish yet another project I'll stop working on in a month.
that doesn't mean much. it has a lot of tests, the architect seems sane, it fits a niche (for example scripts baked into container images don't need full (Node + tsx + esbuild) or Bun/Deno)
>But apparently random HN commenters can now overrule an AI ML expert because the code "looks Claude-ish"!
And let’s imagine if LLM bots could do that as well, without any human caring to type the actual messages, just orchestrating the bot fleet. What trust could be we put in such a brainless peace of publications?
Claude-directed code by someone being conscientious and getting involved in the important decisions is going to be better than a whole swathe of existing open-source that was hand-written.
Maybe if it's a business level tool made in house with claude vs contracted to a software house in India. Never for a compiler, who even is that person?
“Better”, maybe or maybe not. But there’s an underlying truth here. If you’ve ever LOOKED at the open source libs you use, some of them are very very rough.
Going in to a project hoping to make a change and seeing no tests and spaghetti used to be soul crushing. These days I’d have Claude go refactor and add tests and make pull requests for me to look at to fix it.
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.
Christ. Imagine if bridges, skyscrapers, dams, cars, airplanes were designed and built like that.
I vibeslopped thousands of pages of blueprints, nobody reviewed them, but another team of digital monkeys with the intellect of an ant have already built the bridge, and it seems to not have collapsed yet, so we're already directing traffic there.
I can't imagine actual engineers feeling anything but deepest contempt for this industry.
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.
Vercel doing Vercel: 5 days old, entirely vibecoded, already 1.5k stars for no reason, solves no one's issue and will stop being maintained in a few months (if more than this week).
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
Publishing a lib as JS with .d.ts type files gives you JS compatibility and TS types for using the lib, but no TS source so no types inside.
I’ve seen people want to publish TS libs but there are issues: TS will type check the libs as well as your project. You can’t tell it to stop just because it’s going inside node modules. And the app may have tighter settings than the library and you will get type errors if your configs were setup differently. It would be interesting to standardize publishing real typescript libs but I haven’t seen it. Maybe deno tried? I haven’t looked.
This is very interesting and a potential huge win like .NET AOT if it lasts. This has been around for days, so I'm not going to invest any more time than just playing with it at this point, but if this can continue development and not get abandoned, it could be a really nice win for the ecosystem.
As we see more and more heavily AI built open source projects, I wonder how the perception of them becomes. There's a huge spectrum of AI developed code, the same way there is with human code, except a human at least had to think a bit about what they wrote. If you generate code with an LLM to the standards that you'd write it yourself (which is the only way I'd consider for anything important) and you review every bit that's written, I think that's wonderful. Even if you don't, I don't think that's bad, but I will have more friction to adopt that project as there's likely lower quality code and less personal investment into it.
I find that a lot of online discussion has gone either "AI generate everything" or "never AI generate anything", with the middle ground being mostly silent. That's probably just because it's the internet and most people I talk to IRL have a reasonable middle ground take. I'm all for it if it accelerates a person making thoughtful decisions. If not, more power to you, but I'm less inclined to use the software out of fear of using something of poor quality or something that'll be abandonware.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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 :)
Agreed. Along those same lines, their startup time claim "faster than go", gives me concern because the slowest part of go startup is the various GC-related initializations. If they are doing GC, then you would assume their times would be broadly similar.
This is one of the things that is tiring me out the most. Previously people could have these "ohh shiny" ideas and would lose steam before they could be implemented, especially in areas they're clueless about.
Now people can have these ideas, slop together an awful solution that works at a surface level, maybe, but will never really go places because the foundation is slopped with no party involved actually capable of thinking thing through. But hey we launched something so let's make lots of noise! Oh look, a banana ... Sorry, what were we talking about?
There's an engineer on a team at work that I routinely engage with who slops together stuff so fast his team is basically exhausted all the time. They're stuck picking up a whole stream of pieces of crap because the engineer is incapable of actually doing the hard work of getting things to production because there's more "ohh, shiny" stuff they can spend tokens on, and their leadership aren't stepping in because it all looks terribly productive (it really isn't)
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.
Sometimes you are forced to use it - e.g. Bun in Claude Code. I like Opus models, but can't run them outside of Claude Code/Bun in subscription models.
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.
What it can actually compile is a subset of well-behaved typescript. For anything else it bails out and asks you to ship a JS engine (albeit, not NodeJS) again.
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.
another use case is getting standalone self-contained binaries which are easier to ship.
other projects like claude code use something like `bun build --compile`[^1] for that, which instead of producing a small native binary just bundle the JS runtime into the executable.
Don’t see how compiling Typescript changes how little Electron cares about the host OS in terms of UI and how it just ships Chromium in order to show any UI at all
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.
That's a one big hell of a contribution ;-) https://github.com/vercel-labs/scriptc/commit/725b931cf43ba7...
I get so irritated every time Claude says "honest". Anthropic talks about how they specifically engineer for it to be "honest". I'm convinced they're just measuring how many times it says the word honest instead.
4 replies →
Do we have a name for such irony, remove the "honestly price" makes it less honest about what it is
tis
Also the same vibe-code leader as zerolang, "The Programming Language for Agents" which Vercel launched with much fanfare in May, landed 1200 commits and then stopped ~mid-June.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48193539
Kind of funny seeing a serious (?), grown up, for-profit company acting the same way as my scatterbrain clinging into this month's fascination. Luckily, most of my things never see the light of day, so they don't get referenced a month later in a HN burn when I publish yet another project I'll stop working on in a month.
3 replies →
> I have the utmost respect to them (notably simonw)
seems like simon only changed the readme and wasn't really involved in the project.
https://github.com/vercel-labs/scriptc/commits/main/?author=...
Yeah I didn't think I'd be mistaken for being involved in the project!
I deleted two words from the README.
From contributions tab, it looks like 99% was vibe-coded by 1 person, and it does not look like they have any compilers background.
Edit: typo
that doesn't mean much. it has a lot of tests, the architect seems sane, it fits a niche (for example scripts baked into container images don't need full (Node + tsx + esbuild) or Bun/Deno)
4 replies →
Most SaaS products have Vercel as partner, with Next.js and React as the tier 1 SDK on their tooling.
Careful using the term “most” when you mean “the ones I know of”. You would be surprised how much Angular is out there.
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Edit: Removed.
Indeed I am a random, but does it make me less qualified than another random ? (look up ^ )
why so many caps
>But apparently random HN commenters can now overrule an AI ML expert because the code "looks Claude-ish"!
And let’s imagine if LLM bots could do that as well, without any human caring to type the actual messages, just orchestrating the bot fleet. What trust could be we put in such a brainless peace of publications?
Claude-directed code by someone being conscientious and getting involved in the important decisions is going to be better than a whole swathe of existing open-source that was hand-written.
Maybe if it's a business level tool made in house with claude vs contracted to a software house in India. Never for a compiler, who even is that person?
4 replies →
“Better”, maybe or maybe not. But there’s an underlying truth here. If you’ve ever LOOKED at the open source libs you use, some of them are very very rough.
Going in to a project hoping to make a change and seeing no tests and spaghetti used to be soul crushing. These days I’d have Claude go refactor and add tests and make pull requests for me to look at to fix it.
I'm sure that single 800k line commit was created in a very conscientious and involved way.
oof
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.
> 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...
Christ. Imagine if bridges, skyscrapers, dams, cars, airplanes were designed and built like that.
I vibeslopped thousands of pages of blueprints, nobody reviewed them, but another team of digital monkeys with the intellect of an ant have already built the bridge, and it seems to not have collapsed yet, so we're already directing traffic there.
I can't imagine actual engineers feeling anything but deepest contempt for this industry.
8 replies →
They landed 802,000 lines of code in a single commit: https://github.com/vercel-labs/scriptc/commit/23d5918a5381e0...
1 reply →
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.
3 replies →
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)
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Vercel doing Vercel: 5 days old, entirely vibecoded, already 1.5k stars for no reason, solves no one's issue and will stop being maintained in a few months (if more than this week).
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.
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/
> 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.
I would use it for a focused command-line tool that needs to share code with a larger TypeScript project, not for code with a lot of dependencies.
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!
Publishing a lib as JS with .d.ts type files gives you JS compatibility and TS types for using the lib, but no TS source so no types inside.
I’ve seen people want to publish TS libs but there are issues: TS will type check the libs as well as your project. You can’t tell it to stop just because it’s going inside node modules. And the app may have tighter settings than the library and you will get type errors if your configs were setup differently. It would be interesting to standardize publishing real typescript libs but I haven’t seen it. Maybe deno tried? I haven’t looked.
4 replies →
Excellent problem space.
Related problem: Using AI to write compilers that optimize runtime code. I did this for Zod.
https://github.com/gajus/zod-compiler
Zod schemas, compiled at build time into raw boolean chains. 2-74x faster. No code changes. The plugin swaps Zod with compiled parse.
I wrote almost none of the optimizations. Claude did, in a loop, over 100+ iterations.
It works because the compiled version can be diffed against real Zod. Correctness isn't a judgment call. Same as scriptc.
This applies to every program with a reference implementation and a benchmark. Compilers, serializers, formatters, query planners, etc.
Excited for faster Internet.
This is very interesting and a potential huge win like .NET AOT if it lasts. This has been around for days, so I'm not going to invest any more time than just playing with it at this point, but if this can continue development and not get abandoned, it could be a really nice win for the ecosystem.
As we see more and more heavily AI built open source projects, I wonder how the perception of them becomes. There's a huge spectrum of AI developed code, the same way there is with human code, except a human at least had to think a bit about what they wrote. If you generate code with an LLM to the standards that you'd write it yourself (which is the only way I'd consider for anything important) and you review every bit that's written, I think that's wonderful. Even if you don't, I don't think that's bad, but I will have more friction to adopt that project as there's likely lower quality code and less personal investment into it.
I find that a lot of online discussion has gone either "AI generate everything" or "never AI generate anything", with the middle ground being mostly silent. That's probably just because it's the internet and most people I talk to IRL have a reasonable middle ground take. I'm all for it if it accelerates a person making thoughtful decisions. If not, more power to you, but I'm less inclined to use the software out of fear of using something of poor quality or something that'll be abandonware.
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.
GCJ was always a prototype kind of.
Anyone serious would be paying for Excelsior JET, BEA JRockit, or the myriad of other commercial JDKs wihth AOT tooling.
In fact most likely one reasons why Excelsior is not more, is that now GraalVM and OpenJ9 exist as free bear.
PTC and Aicas still have it good, because few care about their embedded and real time customers.
no JavaScript engine in the binary, but optionally bundles a 620KB quickjs runtime. giving up JavaScript but keeping a flask in the desk drawer.
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.
Does that tool already exist, so do you have a specific TS subset in mind you are aiming for? Or you are simply trying to use fewer complex features?
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
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.
It's difficult to ignore how the README is filled with Claudisms.
Looks like PRs are actively accepted. I just got rid of one of them! https://github.com/vercel-labs/scriptc/commit/c4b68dc6d9c259...
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
Perhaps they should be left as a warning to others.
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 :)
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...
It is technically possible to drink soup with a shovel but I don't really wanna do it.
I might be wrong here. What's the use case?
Interesting, I wonder what does no-runtime option mean, no event loop and no async code then?
This project is 5 days old going by the commit history and seems to be entirely vibecoded.
178kb?! What are you putting in there, a JVM?
You're 2-3 orders of magnitude off for a JVM
Agreed. Along those same lines, their startup time claim "faster than go", gives me concern because the slowest part of go startup is the various GC-related initializations. If they are doing GC, then you would assume their times would be broadly similar.
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.
This is one of the things that is tiring me out the most. Previously people could have these "ohh shiny" ideas and would lose steam before they could be implemented, especially in areas they're clueless about.
Now people can have these ideas, slop together an awful solution that works at a surface level, maybe, but will never really go places because the foundation is slopped with no party involved actually capable of thinking thing through. But hey we launched something so let's make lots of noise! Oh look, a banana ... Sorry, what were we talking about?
There's an engineer on a team at work that I routinely engage with who slops together stuff so fast his team is basically exhausted all the time. They're stuck picking up a whole stream of pieces of crap because the engineer is incapable of actually doing the hard work of getting things to production because there's more "ohh, shiny" stuff they can spend tokens on, and their leadership aren't stepping in because it all looks terribly productive (it really isn't)
Does this mean I can turn my JS-based backend into single executable and easily ship it, like in Go?
Recent versions of Node can package a backend into a single binary already, it'll just be 100MB+ and embed the whole Node runtime.
This is more equivalent to Go, with a single static native binary that does not include the whole Node runtime
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.
Sometimes you are forced to use it - e.g. Bun in Claude Code. I like Opus models, but can't run them outside of Claude Code/Bun in subscription models.
Not glamorous but it works
how can you compile it if javascript is a valid subset of typescript? confused.
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.
No idea about this project, but it is very possible to compile a dynamically typed language, without large VM/runtime. See Common Lisp, Julia
Both, basically. Default is the subset, but you can enable an interpreter
What it can actually compile is a subset of well-behaved typescript. For anything else it bails out and asks you to ship a JS engine (albeit, not NodeJS) again.
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/dynascript
API reference : https://github.com/corporatepiyush/dynascript/blob/master/do...
I like the idea.
Whatever happened with their new programming language for agents? I expect this will follow the same path.
finally someone did this
Does it compiles to C? Wasm? I couldn’t find it the readme slop
It compiles to C if you use "--backend c"
Otherwise it looks like it compiles to LLVM.
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?
Some of us don’t like Spotify, Slack, Discord, and a simple notes app taking 1-2GB of RAM each..
Still need the entire browser DOM, APIs, layout, renderers, etc outside of JS.
another use case is getting standalone self-contained binaries which are easier to ship.
other projects like claude code use something like `bun build --compile`[^1] for that, which instead of producing a small native binary just bundle the JS runtime into the executable.
[^1]: https://bun.com/docs/bundler/executables
This is a really important question. If true, it could end a lot of Electron wastefulness.
Don’t see how compiling Typescript changes how little Electron cares about the host OS in terms of UI and how it just ships Chromium in order to show any UI at all
1 reply →
Im 99% certain it cannot. This seems better suited to server side projects.
Deno is building a less-wasteful Electron style framework for native desktop apps
Interesting thread. I use Google AI (incognito mode on iPhone Safari) to discus this topic and manually copy and paste the conversation to a gist:
https://gist.github.com/ontouchstart/46316d23b0b2e772c247ee0...
Then I use the local llama.cpp + llama.cpp/gemma-4-12B-it-Q4_K_M + pi to read above gist and continue the (meta)discussion.
Here is the session export:
https://ontouchstart.github.io/2026/07/27/pi-session-2026-07...
Very entertaining and I have learned a lot.