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acmnrs 4 hours ago [-]
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.
simonw 4 hours ago [-]
> I'm more than a little suspicious of how Vercel has made so much progress so fast
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.
rixed 28 minutes ago [-]
900k lines of code plus tons of deps for a compiler? Does that really make sense to you?
mi_lk 19 minutes ago [-]
It's coming from Vercel, what do you expect?
pizlonator 4 hours ago [-]
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)
bbor 4 hours ago [-]
Putting aside the whole “team of professionals putting out a product vs solo dev fine tuning their opus” of it all:
Can you clarify what about the architecture is ‘idiotic’? Not trying to catch you or demand a defense, just looking for a vague description. I don’t even know how to start examining the architecture of something like this.
pizlonator 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah
- using quickjs at all in a thing that needs perf. Quickjs is hilariously slow. Midwits use it because it has “quick” in the name.
- using floats for numbers and deferring int optimizations for later. Inferring ints is like half the problem of fast JS.
- rejecting inadequately annotated or too dynamic code without a whole heck of a lot of self-reflection about how unlikely that is to work out.
The observation that languages that are even slightly dynamic need dynamic JIT opts is very old; folks figured that out in the 80s.
This project reeks of weapons grade AI psychosis
simonw 3 hours ago [-]
As far as I can tell they pull in QuickJS (actually quickjs-ng) only in the case where the program has untyped dependencies that still need to be run by an interpreter - and they chose that library because it's pretty small (620KB). Did I miss something, are they using it outside of that purpose?
pizlonator 3 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`.
simonw 3 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 3 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 2 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:
If you’re writing Typescript with zero dependencies and trying to target native I feel like it makes more sense to write it in a different language like Rust or Go. The main reason for this I think is getting cheap perf wins by running existing code natively.
timcobb 40 minutes ago [-]
For some new custom small thing you'd be better off using not this though, right?
skeledrew 2 hours ago [-]
> if you don’t believe me, then at least believe Claude
I had to do a triple take on this.
slopinthebag 2 hours ago [-]
I think more human effort is going into defending this project then what was put into the project itself haha.
sroussey 2 hours ago [-]
There is always AssemblyScript
vips7L 3 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?
anematode 3 hours ago [-]
> deferring int optimizations for later
This part made me laugh out loud
Tadpole9181 3 hours ago [-]
So you don't actually have real criticisms of the architecture at all...?
homebrewer 57 minutes ago [-]
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.
satvikpendem 47 minutes ago [-]
"Actual engineers" don't really care about software engineering, much less a strong emotion at all like the "deepest contempt" and many of them already vibe code today for their work anyway.
antonvs 7 minutes ago [-]
> already built the bridge, and it seems to not have collapsed yet, so we're already directing traffic there.
“Actual” engineering went through a phase where bridges and other structures did collapse due to structural flaws - it’s not like they magically figured out ahead of time how to avoid that.
Now, they can build structures that are some specified tolerance away from collapsing, but that’s only the case because the edges of what was possible were explored.
sheept 4 hours ago [-]
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.
bbor 4 hours ago [-]
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!
sroussey 2 hours ago [-]
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.
chilipepperhott 4 hours ago [-]
It's difficult to ignore how the README is filled with Claudisms.
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
binary132 3 hours ago [-]
Perhaps they should be left as a warning to others.
satvikpendem 4 hours ago [-]
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.
localhoster 2 hours ago [-]
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 :)
aabhay 4 hours ago [-]
178kb?! What are you putting in there, a JVM?
SkiFire13 41 minutes ago [-]
You're 2-3 orders of magnitude off for a JVM
zuzululu 29 minutes ago [-]
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?
casper14 4 hours ago [-]
I like the idea.
pdantix 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Twirrim 1 hours ago [-]
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)
xiaodai 4 hours ago [-]
how can you compile it if javascript is a valid subset of typescript? confused.
panzi 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Coding agents. They landed 918,000 lines of code in a single week: https://github.com/vercel-labs/scriptc/graphs/contributors?s...
- 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)
Can you clarify what about the architecture is ‘idiotic’? Not trying to catch you or demand a defense, just looking for a vague description. I don’t even know how to start examining the architecture of something like this.
- using quickjs at all in a thing that needs perf. Quickjs is hilariously slow. Midwits use it because it has “quick” in the name.
- using floats for numbers and deferring int optimizations for later. Inferring ints is like half the problem of fast JS.
- rejecting inadequately annotated or too dynamic code without a whole heck of a lot of self-reflection about how unlikely that is to work out.
The observation that languages that are even slightly dynamic need dynamic JIT opts is very old; folks figured that out in the 80s.
This project reeks of weapons grade AI psychosis
Note that “untyped dependency” means any code that says `any`.
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.
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
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:
I had to do a triple take on this.
This part made me laugh out loud
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.
“Actual” engineering went through a phase where bridges and other structures did collapse due to structural flaws - it’s not like they magically figured out ahead of time how to avoid that.
Now, they can build structures that are some specified tolerance away from collapsing, but that’s only the case because the edges of what was possible were explored.
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/
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’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.
whats the use case for this , make it hard to reverse engineer my node projects?
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)