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Comment by pizlonator

19 hours ago

They will have untyped dependencies. That’s how the TS/JS ecosystem works.

Note that “untyped dependency” means any code that says `any`.

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pizlonator

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simonw  19 hours ago

They won't have untyped dependencies for situations where someone used Scriptc as a way to build a fast binary executable for some custom-written TypeScript, which was the first use-case that came to mind for me.

Being able to build small, fast binaries without writing them in C or Rust - if you're already fluent in TypeScript - seems like a valuable capability.

  • pizlonator  18 hours ago

    Yes, being able to build small and fast binaries in TS would be a valuable capability, which is why basically all of us who work in this space have thought of this idea and rejected it after going deep on it. This isn’t a new idea.

    CanadaHonk has gotten further than the rest of us. It’s surprising and impressive.

    You’re only replying to the quickjs issue I raised, but it’s not the only issue. Their approach to numbers is broken. Their approach to measurement is broken. The quickjs thing raises another red flag: it suggests to me that they are using reference counting, not GC. That’s guaranteed to make them too slow to be useful. (If they weren’t using RC, then they’d have a hard time on the boundary to quickjs.)

    As to the `any` issue, let me explain it in a way you’ll appreciate. I asked Claude how likely it is that TS code uses any, and it found:

    - 79.5% of TS repos use any explicitly. So, about 4/5 chance that newly written dep-free TS code will use it.

    - the explicit any type is about as common as Boolean and void.

    - a third of inferred types are any. That’s huge.

    So, if you don’t believe me, then at least believe Claude: any is a super common type, so they will be falling off into quickjs a lot.

    Oh, and in case it isn’t clear, quickjs-ng is no better than quickjs. They’re the same thing for the purpose of perf

    • simonw  18 hours ago

      The QuickJS thing doesn't seem like a big deal to me, provided the documentation makes it clear that code will run slower if you use Any.

      If I was using this project for something I'd expect to write custom TypeScript for it.

      The floats rather than integers thing does look bad though. I tried compiling their fibonacci example to C (--backend c) and got this:

        static double sc_f_fib(double sc_l_n_0) { /* /private/tmp/fib.ts:1 */
    double sc_t0 = sc_l_n_0;
    double sc_t1 = 2.0;
    bool sc_t2 = sc_t0 < sc_t1;
    double sc_t3;
    if (sc_t2) {
      double sc_t4 = sc_l_n_0;
      sc_t3 = sc_t4;
    } else {
      double sc_t5 = sc_l_n_0;
      double sc_t6 = 1.0;
      double sc_t7 = sc_t5 - sc_t6;
      double sc_t8 = sc_f_fib(sc_t7);
      double sc_t9 = sc_l_n_0;
      double sc_t10 = 2.0;
      double sc_t11 = sc_t9 - sc_t10;
      double sc_t12 = sc_f_fib(sc_t11);
      double sc_t13 = sc_t8 + sc_t12;
      sc_t3 = sc_t13;
    }
    return sc_t3; /* /private/tmp/fib.ts:2 */
  }

      3 replies →

    • slopinthebag  18 hours ago

      I think more human effort is going into defending this project then what was put into the project itself haha.

  • vips7L  18 hours ago

    So like less than 1% of the time? What part of the JS ecosystem doesn’t depend on a mountain of untyped dependencies?

torginus  14 hours ago

Devil's advocate - this is for the backend. You get to control your dependencies there, and I'd say Vercel controls its own stack, so they can replace deps as they go by submitting patches/slopforking projects to remove incompatible features.