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by mgomez 1286 days ago
At the beginning of this year, kdy1 (Donny) said he'd be switching to Go after initially trying things out in Rust [1][2], I guess he decided to go through with Rust after all? Or is this something slightly different?

[1] https://kdy1.dev/posts/2022/1/tsc-go

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30074414

4 comments

From the interview (it's way down the page):

> The most challenging thing is the absence of the specification. I had to infer everything just from test cases.

> The second thing is the velocity of tsc. It's way too fast, and I was unsure if I could follow it up. So I decided to use semi-automated translation and selected Golang.

> But it was too boring, and more importantly, my programming ability has improved enough to follow tsc only by myself.

Looks like he moved back to Rust sometime between January and October, at which point he also changed the name to stc: https://kdy1.dev/posts/2022/10/open-sourcing-stc
From the main post and other comments it seems like it was for personal reasons, rather than pragmatic ones. They said they didn’t know how fast the Go implementation would be, but felt better about the original Rust one (I’m assuming before this really became a problem).

I think the reasons they switched are pretty weak, but justified at the same time. Kdy1 looks like more of a Rust person (their GitHub has more active Rust repos than Go), so this should’ve been the choice from the beginning. Going with the comfortable choice over the “pragmatic” one is almost always the best option if you’re the only contributor (or plan to be for a while).