2 ms·

Under "Why TypeScript won", the article says: > It's self-hosted (tsc is written in TypeScript) Why would that matter? What if TypeScript was written in Rust?

Under "Why TypeScript won", the article says: > It's self-hosted (tsc is written in TypeScript) Why would that matter? What if TypeScript was written in Rust? I would assume the better performance would have increased its adoption even more.

yankput 3y ago
see: flowtype by facebook. I think it died out because no javascript dev wanted to learn OCaml.
- nikitaga 3y ago
  You didn't need Ocaml to use Flow, and it's not like the average Typescript/Flow dev ever looks at the source code of Typescript/Flow, let alone contributes to it. Flow died out because it focused on things that JS devs didn't care about – speed and correctness. The latter especially came at the expense of annoyance: Flow tended to throw errors when you used code patterns with unprovable correctness, whereas Typescript happily "compiled" such patterns without checking their correctness. That was a "good enough" improvement over plain Javascript, and it easily won, being a more established community, and with more support from Microsoft than Flow ever got from Facebook.
arp242 3y ago
Rust can "just" be run; as in, the developer can create a binary and run that. Or you can compile from source without too much trouble with "cargo build". Java is a bit more complex, and was even more complex in the past. You had to download Java (and on Windows, came with this annoying "Java updater" thing), and on Linux/BSD machines it couldn't "just" be installed via the package manager but had to manually download it from the Sun website (at some point Canonical got a special agreement with Sun to allow this though). Later OpenJDK became mature enough to be used, which solved the entire problem, but that took quite a while. This is why Java has traditionally not been huge in the open source world for writing applications.

2 ms·

Under "Why TypeScript won", the article says: > It's self-hosted (tsc is written in TypeScript) Why would that matter? What if TypeScript was written in Rust?

by dheerajvs 3y ago

yankput 3y ago
see: flowtype by facebook. I think it died out because no javascript dev wanted to learn OCaml.
- nikitaga 3y ago
  You didn't need Ocaml to use Flow, and it's not like the average Typescript/Flow dev ever looks at the source code of Typescript/Flow, let alone contributes to it. Flow died out because it focused on things that JS devs didn't care about – speed and correctness. The latter especially came at the expense of annoyance: Flow tended to throw errors when you used code patterns with unprovable correctness, whereas Typescript happily "compiled" such patterns without checking their correctness. That was a "good enough" improvement over plain Javascript, and it easily won, being a more established community, and with more support from Microsoft than Flow ever got from Facebook.
arp242 3y ago
Rust can "just" be run; as in, the developer can create a binary and run that. Or you can compile from source without too much trouble with "cargo build". Java is a bit more complex, and was even more complex in the past. You had to download Java (and on Windows, came with this annoying "Java updater" thing), and on Linux/BSD machines it couldn't "just" be installed via the package manager but had to manually download it from the Sun website (at some point Canonical got a special agreement with Sun to allow this though). Later OpenJDK became mature enough to be used, which solved the entire problem, but that took quite a while. This is why Java has traditionally not been huge in the open source world for writing applications.