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Perry Compiles TypeScript directly to executables using SWC and LLVM
- 0x1997 4mo agohttps://github.com/PerryTS/perry https://github.com/PerryTS/perry
- koteelok 4mo agoThe screenshots in the showcase look goofy
- evil_buzzard 4mo agothe claim of "no runtime" is a bit dubious... you're telling me that you're statically linking a full, modern UI library into every app?
- avaer 4mo agoA runtime is needed for GC, unless you're fundamentally changing Javascript. Even golang has a runtime.
- pjmlp 4mo agoEven C has one, regardless of how tiny it happens to be, or the possibility of freestanding deployment. In compiler speak, a runtime provides all infrastructure required by the language for program startup, shutdown, infrastructure for the standard library execution.
- amlug 4mo agoRUntime is an overused term here. The point is "no JS runtime, JIT-type" Of course there is a (native) runtime, as there is for all languages (like you said) :)
- satvikpendem 4mo agoThey probably are, given that's how Flutter and other Rust GUI frameworks work too.
- skibz 4mo agoIts documentation mentions a garbage collector. https://docs.perryts.com/language/supported-features.html#garbage-collection https://docs.perryts.com/language/supported-features.html#ga...
- ryanshrott 4mo agoStatic linking just puts the runtime inside the binary. The binary size is the real clue here.
- amlug 4mo agoYes. One that makes use of the underlying UI library for the specific system (macOS UI, Win32 UI, GTK4, ....) The Perry runtime is surprisiginly small, especially since we (LLVM rather) strip out all that is no needed in one of the compile steps.
- afavour 4mo agoFascinating. I've written cross platform (WASM, iOS, Android) libraries with Rust before and had a good time but Rust can be a pain too. Cross-platform Typescript is a really interesting proposition. That said, the more I think about it the more dubious I am. The site boasts no runtime dependencies but clearly it’s going to need things like a garbage collector, you can’t just magic that requirement away. At a certain point is it just doing what a JS engine’s JIT compilation does… except ahead of time? Also doesn't inspire confidence that the text on the site is very clearly AI generated and the GitHub log shows an endless stream of AI powered commits. About 15 per hour, every hour? Doesn’t scream stability.
- __s 4mo agotbf Rust also can spit out pretty big binaries for small programs
- afavour 4mo agoAgreed. You can optimize things a fair amount with the Rust compiler, at least.
- metaquestions 4mo agohow do one tell when text is ai generated - honest question. What are the tell tale signs?
- leidenfrost 4mo agoIn regards to the site, all of them follow almost the same templates. Once you see a few, it becomes obvious
- mirekrusin 4mo agoif /comprehensive/ then ai
- microtonal 4mo agoNot X, not Y, just Z. The whole site is very jarring to read.
- koteelok 4mo agoCalling a couple million lines of ai written Rust "stable software" is a bold statement
- fooker 4mo agovibeware :)
- __s 4mo agoCurious where on spectrum compiling to wasm falls between art project & optimization potential. Should be able to make some nice interfaces between TS-wasm & TS-web
- haeseong 4mo ago[flagged]
- madanparas 4mo agoPerry uses NaN-boxing to preserve TypeScript's dynamic type system at runtime, the same approach as JavaScriptCore. The PERF_ROADMAP is honest about the cost: 1.86x behind Zig on image convolution, with 1.24 billion wasted instructions traced specifically to NaN-box unboxing. You cannot get C-level performance without dropping TypeScript semantics, and dropping them means you are no longer compiling TypeScript.
- Dylan16807 4mo agoI think you mean you can't get that performance without monomorphization. When you know the types you can... ...wait, I went and looked up that file. "The Three Optimizations That Would Close the Gap" You're presenting the data from there in an extremely misleading way! They in no way need to drop any Typescript semantics to go faster.
- madanparas 4mo agoYou're right. The typed buffer locals optimization keeps TypeScript semantics intact by exploiting the existing Buffer/Uint8Array type annotation to skip the NaN-unbox. It's not dropping types, it's using them. The floor I described applies to any-typed paths where static type info isn't available. For well-typed TypeScript, the roadmap shows the gap closes without semantic changes.
- drawfloat 4mo agoPut the LLM down and talk to humans as a human.
- cornholio 4mo agoTypescript is a dynamic language. Without changing the language, there is fundamentaly no way to resolve at compile time decisions that can be made only at runtime (ie, they are data driven). Monomorphization helps pin down (some) dynamic types but the fundamental problem remains.
- 4mo ago
- smasher164 4mo agoI'm not against AI usage but the website, documentation, and even the comments the creator (proggeramlug) makes in response to questions are all very clearly AI-generated. Also, as someone else noticed, the pacing of the commits is eerily fast. That combined with the level of functionality makes me dubious how much accountability the creators have over the implementation. Like you really built a backend that lowers to LLVM, integrated it with a generational gc, wrote a cross-platform reactive runtime, and built support for eleven different targets within like a year? Are you just prompting the model to tack on the next coolest thing or do you understand how these features work? I worry how many of these kinds of projects will show up now. How do you guarantee stability? If there's a memory corruption error in the GC implementation, who's going to debug it?
- fooker 4mo agoThis is how software development works now. We have to live with it. The models are good enough that this works. You can keep disagreeing for a while, but know that almost all the code in the industry is written like this now.
- rzmmm 4mo agoI have used AI agents extensively for coding and my experience is that it's fine for prototypes, but in large projects like this there is risk that the codebase becomes unmaintainable.
- fooker 4mo agoThis is a very popular opinion that is sort of obsolete now in my opinion. It was a valid concern last year. We have seen tremendous progress on this in the last 4-6 months. Even if your initial prototypes are unmaintainable slop, the state of the art models are fairly good at refactoring and fixing things.
- incrudible 4mo agoIn large projects there is always a risk, if not an inevitability, that a code base becomes unmaintanable by some definition. AI surfaces this faster, but also AI lowers the cost of testing and refactoring. AI gives a linear multiplier in producing solutions, but complexity gives a quadratic increase in problems. The art of producing software has always been in choosing what not to do.
- fooker 4mo agoWhy go through LLVM at all? There are a bunch of tools that JIT somewhat optimized assembly.
- silverwind 4mo agoYeah, a missed opportunity. But I'm sure such a compiler will eventually arise.
- jeswin 4mo agoFirst of all, congrats. The website doesn't explain how it works in a lot of detail. I am the author of tsonic [1], a TS compiler that produces binaries via Clr NativeAOT (on Linux/Mac). The hardest parts were numbers (TS has no ints or shorts), Generics, and TS Utility Types. I've been on it for the last 6 months (almost every day); getting to near complete TS compatibility is a very long journey because of its expressiveness. Add: A request is to explain how it works on the website. I did take a look at https://www.perryts.com/en/internals/ https://www.perryts.com/en/internals/ but are those techniques described really sufficient to express TS? Based on my experience, I must say I'm surprised. But the proof is in the pudding, and if it's compiling those examples it must be working somehow! [1]: https://tsonic.org https://tsonic.org
- thayne 4mo ago> The hardest parts were numbers (TS has no ints or shorts) The easy way to handle that would be to just treat "number" as 64-bit float, since that is semantically how Javascript defines them. But that can hurt performance. Another option is to define your own integer types
- jeswin 4mo ago> Another option is to define your own integer types This is what I did. Most int usage is inferred, but if they had to define it explicitly, I make them import { int } from "@tsonic/core/types.js";
- Reubend 4mo agoHey there, I'm going to check out your project because the comments here have me a little worried that OP's project might have some quality issues. Two things I found a little confusing from the docs though: I couldn't easily find a page describing what it can't do yet. I saw that it only works with a "strict, deterministic subset of TypeScript", but is there a page showing what's included and not included in that subset? Also, what's an "ambient surface" in this context? Is that a compiler term I'm just not familiar with?
- 4mo ago
- ventana 4mo agoI understand that implementing the TypeScript compiler is not the same thing as implementing all Node.js APIs, but still, advertising "no runtime" and then requiring JS runtime (and a full local Rust setup to compile it) for something as basic as an Express web server makes the "no runtime" claim look like a slight exaggeration. I'm not saying that it's bad, it's just that the website is too optimistic. Edit: as discussed in the thread below, the most likely reason for that is that Express is pure JS with types from @types/express, so the TypeScript compiler bails on it. Reasonable, but still frustrating. Overall, it seems like every time I decide to try a vibe coded compiler I get this feeling like when you see a plate with fruits on a table but, coming closer, see that they are fake plastic fruits. No, I cannot use it to build a native binary of my project without V8 as easy as shown on the front page. Maybe some other project, yes, but not a real one. Unrelated: if a project is called Perry, should the icon be a platypus in a hat, you know?
- nl 4mo agoThis seems either wrong or very uncharitable. > Perry exposes a faithful subset of Node.js’s stdlib HTTP server modules on top of hyper + rustls + tokio-tungstenite. The whole shape — handler signature, IncomingMessage / ServerResponse properties + methods, TLS opts, ALPN-negotiated HTTP/2, WebSocket upgrade dispatch — works unmodified, so unmodified Node servers (Express / Koa / Polka / hono via @hono/node-server / etc.) compile and run natively[1] It's pretty standard for "no runtime" to mean nothing on the device you install the compiled target app. I think iOS development still needs Ruby for Pod installation but no one says Swift apps need a Ruby runtime for example. [1] https://docs.perryts.com/stdlib/http.html https://docs.perryts.com/stdlib/http.html
- ventana 4mo agoWell, I did indeed spend some time playing with it before writing my comment. I first tried to compile the TypeScript project I'm working on, and it happens to be an Express server. After some minor unrelated fixes required (Perry does not understand importing "fs/promises", so I fixed it to import "fs" and then taking .promises) it said it needs JS runtime, and the smallest repro I found was $ cat index.ts import * as express from 'express'; const app = express(); which gives $ perry index.ts Collecting modules... JS module: express -> /private/tmp/ex/node_modules/express/index.js Error: build pulled in `perry-jsruntime` (QuickJS-based eval-equivalent runtime) via the following file(s): - /private/tmp/ex/node_modules/express/index.js [express] `perry-jsruntime` is treated as a privileged dependency on par with adding a JIT to the binary — it re-introduces arbitrary runtime code execution and defeats Perry's structural advantage over Node. Refusing to link by default. (#499) To enable, set `perry.allowJsRuntime: true` in the host package.json, or pass `--enable-js-runtime` on the CLI for a one-off build. (Falls under `--lockdown` deny set when that flag ships — see #496.) Maybe it's because Express is written in JavaScript with external types from @types/express, that would explain why it might need JS runtime, but it does not make things easier for me.
- jeswin 4mo ago> Traditional OOP runtimes use vtables for method resolution, adding a layer of indirection on every call. Perry resolves all method calls statically during compilation, turning interface method calls into direct jumps. What? How is this possible, even with something as simple as: interface Animal { speak(): string; } class Cat implements Animal {} class Dog implements Animal {} function makeSound(animal: Animal) { return animal.speak(); }
- avaer 4mo agoIt's not possible, it reduces to the halting problem, unless you start restricting the Javascript/Typescript you allow. Otherwise the best you can do is be solid on common special cases. Which is what a modern (non-static) JS/TS runtime is.
- fooker 4mo agoYou can just generate the 'vtable' as code :) switch (animal.type) case Cat: return cat_speak() case Dog: return dog_speak() The generated code has the functions resolved in compile time, there's no function pointer lookup in a table happening. I don't know if this is how this project does it, but this is the commonly used technique when you want to do this.
- jeswin 4mo agoHmm yeah good point. I didn't think of it. It might even be cheaper to do this when the list of possible types are closed and few. I am still inclined to believe AI just made up the documentation though, because this has its own tradeoffs.
- fooker 4mo ago> might even be cheaper to do this Oh yeah, very often. Especially if it's a loop and resolves the same way very often. Modern CPUs just blaze through code like this, after three decades optimizing for object oriented and dynamic languages.
- 4mo ago
- satvikpendem 4mo agoA very interesting project because I always thought TypeScript or at least some subset of it should be natively compiled. It looks like others had a similar idea too, adding a "sound mode" to TypeScript, such as this project which is converting tsgo to Rust, also with LLMs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48189156#48189573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48189156#48189573 https://tsz.dev/ https://tsz.dev/
- jeswin 4mo ago> such as this project which is converting tsgo to Rust If you'd like to follow, here's my attempt at converting tsgo to typescript (called tsts [1]). Admittedly there's AI involved, but it's a very mechanical job. Going from golang to ts is not a very difficult problem, the other way around would have been way harder. The plan is to then compile tsts to binary via tsonic. [1]: https://github.com/tsoniclang/tsts https://github.com/tsoniclang/tsts
- satvikpendem 4mo agoInteresting, seems to be a very roundabout way of doing it. Have you tried compiling the current TypeScript implementation which is still in TypeScript, as tsgo is for TS 7? If so, what were the results?
- jeswin 4mo agoYep. The MS compiler written in TypeScript has a lot of dynamic behavior which tsonic cannot support. Those were not easy to port either, and tsgo seemed like a much easier target.
- IshKebab 4mo agoUhm... You're trying to port Typescript's Typescript-to-Go port back to Typescript? Am I missing something?
- jeswin 4mo agoYes. :) With the goal of compiling it to native code. It's mostly a mechanical port. Hoping to do a Show HN maybe in a month.
- hypendev 4mo agoPerry definitely looks interesting, was just looking at getting one of these to include into my framework. Would love to see more about it, or see more about the actual compiler docs. While the UI framework part is neat, I prefer not to force everything into TS. Combining it means UI definitions and semantics get mixed into AST, making the unbundling of them a humongous task in itself. Exactly the reason I built my own with pretty similar native UI semantics which supports Rust, Go, Kotlin and more (https://hypen.space https://hypen.space) - would love to integrate Perry with it to compile TS apps directly into the runtime - but while the idea itself is great, looking at the documentation makes it hard to implement, and a lot of parts seem confusing. Can I just use the compiler without the rest of the framework? What is the architecture? What are the limits? After digging through the documentation, I'm unfortunately just more confused honestly. There are dozens of packages and slop markdown files such as `BUG_STRING_COMPARISON.md` and or `PERRY_UI_IMPLEMENTATION.md` which is an instruction file left for the LLM that just makes me trust the project less. So while the idea is cool and the performance seems cool, the AI slop presentation would definitely need improvement. Adding a human touch would make it much, much better, as one could actually understand what they are dealing with.
- Reubend 4mo ago> 0 ms Startup time Is that true? It just goes right into the code with no initialization of any other libraries needed?
- curtisblaine 4mo agoI'm confused by the (frankly bad) documentation. It says that for pure js dependencies we need to use the v8 flag to bring in the runtime (which is undesirable), but what is the practical difference between a js file and the same file with .ts extension and explicit *any* type in every signature? Does this mean that we have to be very careful how we write our typescript to avoid v8 (and if yes, how? I couldn't find that on the site) or does it mean that we can get away with transpiling everything to ts with loose typing? I suspect it's the first, in which case it's literally the most important information that anyone using Perry needs to know, and it should be one of the first things mentioned in their AI-vibed page.
- alex7o 4mo agoIt would be super cool, if we can get this to compile the typescript compiler and see how fast it is against the go version. P.S: does it have PGO for collapsing numbers to ints when possible etc
- mittermayr 4mo agoBrowsing through the repo, I noticed this, and wondered if that isn't a recipe for disaster (code is condensed to showcase my concern)? app.get('/api/auth/callback', async (request: any, reply: any) => { const params: any = request.query || {}; const code = params.code || ''; const state = params.state || ''; // Exchange code for token via curl const tokenResult = curlExec( 'curl -s -X POST "https://github.com/login/oauth/access_token" -H "Accept: application/json" -d "client_id=' + GITHUB_CLIENT_ID + '&client_secret=' + GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET + '&code=' + code + '"' ); Shell injection?
- chenzhekl 4mo agoWhy is this on the front page of Hacker News? Isn't it just more vibe-coded garbage where nobody takes responsibility for the resulting code?
- tacone 4mo agoJust spent an hour trying to make it work (including re-compiling) with the jsruntime. `Error: JavaScript modules found but libperry_jsruntime.a not found. Build it with: cargo build --release -p perry-jsruntime` Turns out jsruntime was removed one week ago, but the error messages probably not have been updated as they should. https://github.com/PerryTS/perry/commit/848339fa4ee4b00a53f5ffa37d13deae0896e1ad https://github.com/PerryTS/perry/commit/848339fa4ee4b00a53f5...
- lenkite 4mo agoWhy are all vibe-coded web-site cards so stupidly identical ? I have seen dozens of these and whenever they use cards, there is an icon taking valuable space by itself followed by a header. That is ridiculous design and any designer/CSS developer would point that out. So why do LLMs emit this ?
- Alifatisk 4mo agoSeems like many in the comments is confused and unsure how this project actually managed to accomplish all the claims the website. To me, after realizing its ai slop, I lost interest. I feel like we are seeing more and more of this scenario in here. Should we perhaps start adding a tag in the title to mention that its LLM assisted work?