Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tybit 2335 days ago
This is a great talk, I was struck by how similar some of the high level design goals are to LLVM https://www.aosabook.org/en/llvm.html

I kind of hope Anders moves on from TypeScript soon, he’s done a fantastic job there considering the constraints of JavaScript, but I’d love to see him tackle something new.

3 comments

Between Delphi, C#, and TypeScript the man has already had a storied and impactful career.
Yes, he’s fantastically accomplished and capable, and I think he could do amazing things in a new area.

I’d love to see him take lessons learned from C# for a language designed for WASM from the get go.

But wasm is an architecture. Like x86. The more interesting question is: what language is optimal for the use cases wasm serves. Games come into mind.
WASM is just yet another bytecode format.

AssemblyScript is already quite ahead regarding WASM support.

Unfortunately, he is quite adamantly not a fan of WASM.
Why is he not?
Only thing I could find of him mentioning WebAssembly was here at 19:45: https://youtu.be/MxB0ldQfvT4?t=1185

In that video he says that it’s not a suitable target for TypeScript to compile to because WebAssembly doesn’t have a garbage collector. They’d have to basically implement an entire JavaScript engine in WebAssembly which would be pointless.

He gives some examples of things it could be good for, which are all CPU intensive things like image processing and video games, but he doesn’t seem to think it’s really suitable for making normal web apps.

My three favourite languages ever (with Turbo Pascal as my first proper programming language) - The man has quite simply defined my career.
You forgot about the previous 10 year's of the man's career with Turbo Pascal.
Also his first work in Microsoft: Windows Foundation Classes (WFC) and Visual J++ development system.
He says he doesn’t think he’ll make another language. Which is a shame... I’d particularly like to see an actually good language for Azure(/cloud in general) resource management. There have been a bunch of attempts, but typically they’re just config files are their core.

Anyone know a declarative interface for describing services and their interactions that “compiles” to a complete cloud resource manager.

Very basic stuff. Actually only the fact that for a syntax aware editor you need other data structures than for a compiler and that edits only affect parts of that structure.