[gwbas1c]

Thanks for answering questions.

One thing I'm curious about: What about updating the original Typescript-based compiler to target WASM and/or native code, without needing to run in a Javascript VM?

Was that considered? What would (at a high level) the obstacles be to achieving similar performance to Golang?

Edit: Clarified to show that I indicate updating the original compiler.

[rafram]

It's unlikely that you would get much performance benefit from AOT compiling a TypeScript codebase. (At least not with a ton of manual optimization of the native code, and if you're going to do that, why not just rewrite in a native-first language?)

JavaScript, like other dynamic languages, runs well with a JIT because the runtime can optimize for hotspots and common patterns (e.g. this method's first argument is generally an object with this shape, so write a fast path for that case). In theory you could write an AOT compiler for TypeScript that made some of those inferences at compile time based on type definitions, but

(a) nobody's done that

(b) it still wouldn't be as fast as native, or much faster than JIT

(c) it would be limited - any optimizations would die as soon as you used an inherently dynamic method like JSON.parse()

[gwbas1c]

So basically, TypeScript as a language doesn't allow compiling to as as efficient machine code as Golang? (Edit) And I assume it's not practical to alter the language in a way that this kind of information can be added. (Such as adding a typed version of JSON.parse()).