JoeDohn11 hours ago
Vercel sloping it's way to clout again, they do this every month or so, clearly they want to stay in the news and some how credible and relevant.
I can't think of any serious company or project that would use this thing.
P.S: I just checked the contributors list, I have the utmost respect to them (notably simonw), but clearly this code is claude'ish but it is not among the contributor which makes it even more suspect.
piterrro10 hours ago
That's a one big hell of a contribution ;-) https://github.com/vercel-labs/scriptc/commit/725b931cf43ba7...
bilalq4 hours ago
I get so irritated every time Claude says "honest". Anthropic talks about how they specifically engineer for it to be "honest". I'm convinced they're just measuring how many times it says the word honest instead.
ljm10 minutes ago
I'm amused by Claude developing its own corporate jargon which, while clearly pulled from the corpus of human language, is quite distinct from the bullshit traded over the boardroom table.
I've had trouble unpacking some of the copy it generates because its default tone of voice is fairly unintuitive. It's almost like it's designed to induce psychosis because it makes you feel like you've discovered something novel.
Fredkin3 hours ago
I have spent a small fortune in tokens trying to get Anthropic models to attempt proofs of things like the irrationality of the Euler-Mascheroni constant, and to make lattice reduction / SVP algorithms that rival SOTA methods like the G6K sieve, and all sorts of difficult frontier problems. It says 'honest' as a euphemism for giving up, because it knows I'm being a crank, and because the training data contains a lot of pessimism.
But I can get around this by first having it write a prompt for itself discussing the problem followed by a rousing speech about never giving in and admitting defeat, but pressing on towards results regardless of how hard matching SOTA results is.
podviaznikovan hour ago
yeah, it crazy.
I checked my history and mapped how often it started to use "honest" and it's too much https://x.com/podviaznikov/status/2067231875068768447
vessenes4 hours ago
It's in the constitution, probably a lot. And in the RL training. You can tell Anthropic is really worried about it. I'm interested in just how dishonest the so-called 'helpful only' non-RL model they have floating around internally is. Probably pretty dishonest.
yard20109 hours ago
Do we have a name for such irony, remove the "honestly price" makes it less honest about what it is
andytratt10 hours ago
tis
themgt9 hours ago
Also the same vibe-code leader as zerolang, "The Programming Language for Agents" which Vercel launched with much fanfare in May, landed 1200 commits and then stopped ~mid-June.
embedding-shape9 hours ago
Kind of funny seeing a serious (?), grown up, for-profit company acting the same way as my scatterbrain clinging into this month's fascination. Luckily, most of my things never see the light of day, so they don't get referenced a month later in a HN burn when I publish yet another project I'll stop working on in a month.
pacoWebConsult3 hours ago
Is it really that bad of an idea to experiment, put things out into public, and see what works and what sticks? They haven't abandoned agent-browser and portless, which came out of these vercel-labs efforts because they're useful tools and people are using them.
embedding-shapean hour ago
> Is it really that bad of an idea to experiment
I don't think so, I literally think it's fun to see. Sharing projects regardless of how done, mature, reliable, correct or not they are, feels like a net positive for humanity.
simlevesquean hour ago
Back in the days we used to call this R&D.
tom13377 hours ago
> I have the utmost respect to them (notably simonw)
seems like simon only changed the readme and wasn't really involved in the project.
https://github.com/vercel-labs/scriptc/commits/main/?author=...
simonw3 hours ago
Yeah I didn't think I'd be mistaken for being involved in the project!
I deleted two words from the README.
risyachka10 hours ago
From contributions tab, it looks like 99% was vibe-coded by 1 person, and it does not look like they have any compilers background.
Edit: typo
pas10 hours ago
that doesn't mean much. it has a lot of tests, the architect seems sane, it fits a niche (for example scripts baked into container images don't need full (Node + tsx + esbuild) or Bun/Deno)
kaoD8 hours ago
Personally my benchmark for a compiler is way higher than "it has a lot of tests". Way higher.
trueno6 hours ago
this. it's also insane that some are willing to do anything but use something other than javascript. out of all the languages to die on a hill for...
the only group i noddingly approve of being that programmatically bigoted are the clojure-or-i'm-setting-myself-on-fire guys. they've earned it
risyachka7 hours ago
>> that doesn't mean much. it has a lot of tests
tests don't mean much if you are not an expert on the subject
andsoitis3 hours ago
> >> that doesn't mean much. it has a lot of tests
> tests don't mean much if you are not an expert on the subject
I think the bet is that the AI is an expert, given the vast literature and open source around compilers.
pjmlp10 hours ago
Most SaaS products have Vercel as partner, with Next.js and React as the tier 1 SDK on their tooling.
reactordev5 hours ago
Careful using the term “most” when you mean “the ones I know of”. You would be surprised how much Angular is out there.
pjmlp5 hours ago
Name one that gives 100% parity to React in their SDK to write extensions.
Not works in some of the cases and you have to implement fetch calls yourself, or some iframe boilerplate and JS glue, everything they expose in React is fully available in Angular, including field extensions, inline previews, sidebar extensions, the whole lot.
mattstir4 hours ago
That doesn't change the fact that there is a lot of Angular out there. No one's doubting how useful Next.js may or may not be, it's just a matter of fact that plenty of systems were created before it was available and not everyone has the luxury of rewriting their entire product.
pjmlp4 hours ago
Moving goalposts, the point was about SaaS SDKs giving tier1 support for React and nothing else, thus giving Vercel their current market position.
Invalidating the remark "I can't think of any serious company or project that would use this thing."
Where's the example?
shimmanan hour ago
I'll be honest I have never heard of this nor do I understand why it matters. It looks like it's just internal Vercel marketing speak that basically amounts to them desperately trying to build a platform and extract rents off of it.
pjmlpan hour ago
It matters, because React is one of the reasons FE development sucks nowadays, and in many cases there are no alternatives, unless one loves yak shaving for their framework du jour.
reactordev4 hours ago
I think you are confusing React SDK with Vercel SDK.
pjmlp3 hours ago
They are both pushed by the same company, even more so since many React contributors became Vercel employees.
React is designed with Next.js needs in mind nowadays.
kristiandupont44 minutes ago
Perhaps the newer features of React are but thankfully those bits can be completely ignored.
[deleted]4 hours agocollapsed
bubble_niter10 hours ago
Edit: Removed.
JoeDohn10 hours ago
Indeed I am a random, but does it make me less qualified than another random ? (look up ^ )
andytratt10 hours ago
why so many caps
psychoslave10 hours ago
>But apparently random HN commenters can now overrule an AI ML expert because the code "looks Claude-ish"!
And let’s imagine if LLM bots could do that as well, without any human caring to type the actual messages, just orchestrating the bot fleet. What trust could be we put in such a brainless peace of publications?
petesergeant10 hours ago
Claude-directed code by someone being conscientious and getting involved in the important decisions is going to be better than a whole swathe of existing open-source that was hand-written.
Perz1val10 hours ago
Maybe if it's a business level tool made in house with claude vs contracted to a software house in India. Never for a compiler, who even is that person?
TeMPOraL9 hours ago
> Never for a compiler, who even is that person?
Why do you care?
It's a stranger from the Internet. Same as with any other software you're using. In particular, same as with any OSS tool you're using.
andsoitis3 hours ago
> > Never for a compiler, who even is that person?
> Why do you care?
> It's a stranger from the Internet. Same as with any other software you're using. In particular, same as with any OSS tool you're using.
Don't you think that even if you don't know someone personally, you can calibrate your trust in their ability based on reputation, track record.
TeMPOraL2 hours ago
Yes. But we usually start with a high default, and only recalibrate if there's a specific reason in a given situation (e.g. there's been a specific user or sets of users involved in spreading malware, and software in question could've been targeted).
petesergeant39 minutes ago
> you can calibrate your trust in their ability based on reputation, track record
rarely. How many of the libraries you pull from package managers do you actually know the authors of?
geraldwhen8 hours ago
“Better”, maybe or maybe not. But there’s an underlying truth here. If you’ve ever LOOKED at the open source libs you use, some of them are very very rough.
Going in to a project hoping to make a change and seeing no tests and spaghetti used to be soul crushing. These days I’d have Claude go refactor and add tests and make pull requests for me to look at to fix it.
bakugo8 hours ago
I'm sure that single 800k line commit was created in a very conscientious and involved way.
andytratt10 hours ago
oof
acmnrs15 hours ago
Porforr<https://porffor.dev> has been working towards the same goal for a while. The creator, CanadaHonk<https://honk.foo>, is extremely talented and the project still only passes ~68% of Test262. I'm more than a little suspicious of how Vercel has made so much progress so fast, unless I'm misunderstanding the scope of this project.
simonw15 hours ago
> I'm more than a little suspicious of how Vercel has made so much progress so fast
Coding agents. They landed 918,000 lines of code in a single week: https://github.com/vercel-labs/scriptc/graphs/contributors?s...
homebrewer12 hours ago
Christ. Imagine if bridges, skyscrapers, dams, cars, airplanes were designed and built like that.
I vibeslopped thousands of pages of blueprints, nobody reviewed them, but another team of digital monkeys with the intellect of an ant have already built the bridge, and it seems to not have collapsed yet, so we're already directing traffic there.
I can't imagine actual engineers feeling anything but deepest contempt for this industry.
satvikpendem12 hours ago
"Actual engineers" don't really care about software engineering, much less a strong emotion at all like the "deepest contempt" and many of them already vibe code today for their work anyway.
leansensei10 hours ago
Oh no, we do, because the software world has been abusing what engineering means for decades, in order to inflate job titles. Most people are programmers, not software engineers, and that's OK.
satvikpendem2 hours ago
Maybe you're an outlier seeing as you're even on this forum. Most other non software engineers I know do not give a single thought about "title inflation," it does not even register in their minds as a topic to think about.
daishi556 hours ago
What we do is absolutely engineering, there’s just a lot less credentialing upfront and rigor before something is released, because usually people’s lives do not depend on it and it’s easy to release updates.
But it is indeed engineering, and that’s OK.
zaphirplane4 hours ago
Why is it engineering what makes it engineering
daishi552 hours ago
We use science and technology to design, build, and maintain complex systems that solve real-world problems.
Do you have some other definition of engineering that excludes SWE?
igleria8 hours ago
as long as they stay away from boeing or anything that flies...
antonvs11 hours ago
> already built the bridge, and it seems to not have collapsed yet, so we're already directing traffic there.
“Actual” engineering went through a phase where bridges and other structures did collapse due to structural flaws - it’s not like they magically figured out ahead of time how to avoid that.
Now, they can build structures that are some specified tolerance away from collapsing, but that’s only the case because the edges of what was possible were explored.
themgt10 hours ago
They landed 802,000 lines of code in a single commit: https://github.com/vercel-labs/scriptc/commit/23d5918a5381e0...
badatnames7 hours ago
This is not the Vercel ad they think it is.
acmnrs15 hours ago
That makes sense. It also seems like this uses a lot more dependencies and tiers of compilation whereas Porforr is trying to do everything from scratch.
rixed11 hours ago
900k lines of code plus tons of deps for a compiler? Does that really make sense to you?
mi_lk11 hours ago
It's coming from Vercel, what do you expect?
queenkjuul8 hours ago
I don't actually see any dependencies other than node and typescript (and the optional quickjs package) (maybe they inlined dependencies? But the package.json files don't indicate any npm dependencies)
pizlonator15 hours ago
That explains why:
- the architecture is idiotic.
- they have zero credible perf numbers.
I plan to benchmark it using generally accepted methods.
Porffor makes careful trade offs that make sense and is benchmarked in a way that I can believe.
(Source: I make dynamic languages fast for a living)
bbor15 hours ago
Putting aside the whole “team of professionals putting out a product vs solo dev fine tuning their opus” of it all:
Can you clarify what about the architecture is ‘idiotic’? Not trying to catch you or demand a defense, just looking for a vague description. I don’t even know how to start examining the architecture of something like this.
pizlonator14 hours ago
Yeah
- using quickjs at all in a thing that needs perf. Quickjs is hilariously slow. Midwits use it because it has “quick” in the name.
- using floats for numbers and deferring int optimizations for later. Inferring ints is like half the problem of fast JS.
- rejecting inadequately annotated or too dynamic code without a whole heck of a lot of self-reflection about how unlikely that is to work out.
The observation that languages that are even slightly dynamic need dynamic JIT opts is very old; folks figured that out in the 80s.
This project reeks of weapons grade AI psychosis
simonw14 hours ago
As far as I can tell they pull in QuickJS (actually quickjs-ng) only in the case where the program has untyped dependencies that still need to be run by an interpreter - and they chose that library because it's pretty small (620KB). Did I miss something, are they using it outside of that purpose?
pizlonator14 hours ago
They will have untyped dependencies. That’s how the TS/JS ecosystem works.
Note that “untyped dependency” means any code that says `any`.
simonw14 hours ago
They won't have untyped dependencies for situations where someone used Scriptc as a way to build a fast binary executable for some custom-written TypeScript, which was the first use-case that came to mind for me.
Being able to build small, fast binaries without writing them in C or Rust - if you're already fluent in TypeScript - seems like a valuable capability.
pizlonator14 hours ago
Yes, being able to build small and fast binaries in TS would be a valuable capability, which is why basically all of us who work in this space have thought of this idea and rejected it after going deep on it. This isn’t a new idea.
CanadaHonk has gotten further than the rest of us. It’s surprising and impressive.
You’re only replying to the quickjs issue I raised, but it’s not the only issue. Their approach to numbers is broken. Their approach to measurement is broken. The quickjs thing raises another red flag: it suggests to me that they are using reference counting, not GC. That’s guaranteed to make them too slow to be useful. (If they weren’t using RC, then they’d have a hard time on the boundary to quickjs.)
As to the `any` issue, let me explain it in a way you’ll appreciate. I asked Claude how likely it is that TS code uses any, and it found:
- 79.5% of TS repos use any explicitly. So, about 4/5 chance that newly written dep-free TS code will use it.
- the explicit any type is about as common as Boolean and void.
- a third of inferred types are any. That’s huge.
So, if you don’t believe me, then at least believe Claude: any is a super common type, so they will be falling off into quickjs a lot.
Oh, and in case it isn’t clear, quickjs-ng is no better than quickjs. They’re the same thing for the purpose of perf
simonw13 hours ago
The QuickJS thing doesn't seem like a big deal to me, provided the documentation makes it clear that code will run slower if you use Any.
If I was using this project for something I'd expect to write custom TypeScript for it.
The floats rather than integers thing does look bad though. I tried compiling their fibonacci example to C (--backend c) and got this:
static double sc_f_fib(double sc_l_n_0) { /* /private/tmp/fib.ts:1 */
double sc_t0 = sc_l_n_0;
double sc_t1 = 2.0;
bool sc_t2 = sc_t0 < sc_t1;
double sc_t3;
if (sc_t2) {
double sc_t4 = sc_l_n_0;
sc_t3 = sc_t4;
} else {
double sc_t5 = sc_l_n_0;
double sc_t6 = 1.0;
double sc_t7 = sc_t5 - sc_t6;
double sc_t8 = sc_f_fib(sc_t7);
double sc_t9 = sc_l_n_0;
double sc_t10 = 2.0;
double sc_t11 = sc_t9 - sc_t10;
double sc_t12 = sc_f_fib(sc_t11);
double sc_t13 = sc_t8 + sc_t12;
sc_t3 = sc_t13;
}
return sc_t3; /* /private/tmp/fib.ts:2 */
}slopinthebag13 hours ago
If you’re writing Typescript with zero dependencies and trying to target native I feel like it makes more sense to write it in a different language like Rust or Go. The main reason for this I think is getting cheap perf wins by running existing code natively.
timcobb12 hours ago
For some new custom small thing you'd be better off using not this though, right?
queenkjuul8 hours ago
Personally i can kind of see a use case here. I've shipped some simple server side packages as a "compiled" Node single executable written in TS, but you're stuck with the big overhead of Node.
I've just been teaching myself Go, also a single binary but without the overhead. But in Go i miss the expressiveness of the TS type system sometimes.
skeledrew13 hours ago
> if you don’t believe me, then at least believe Claude
I had to do a triple take on this.
sroussey13 hours ago
There is always AssemblyScript
slopinthebag13 hours ago
I think more human effort is going into defending this project then what was put into the project itself haha.
vips7L14 hours ago
So like less than 1% of the time? What part of the JS ecosystem doesn’t depend on a mountain of untyped dependencies?
torginus9 hours ago
Devil's advocate - this is for the backend. You get to control your dependencies there, and I'd say Vercel controls its own stack, so they can replace deps as they go by submitting patches/slopforking projects to remove incompatible features.
piker8 hours ago
> "As far as I can tell they..."
This phrase I think highlights the fundamental issue for a lot of folks that would otherwise consider adopting a project like this written by humans.
anematode14 hours ago
> deferring int optimizations for later
This part made me laugh out loud
Altern4tiveAcc6 hours ago
> using floats for numbers and deferring int optimizations for later. Inferring ints is like half the problem of fast JS.
For a project like this, isn't it worth introducing a TS type for Ints? Since they are trying to leverage TypeScript anyway...
drunkenmagician10 hours ago
"This project reeks of weapons grade AI psychosis" - fantastic quote: I will shamelessly steal & use. Apologies to pizlonator
Tadpole918114 hours ago
So you don't actually have real criticisms of the architecture at all...?
jeswin7 hours ago
Just randomly:
1. TS only has a "number" type. But what type of number is it? This is doable safely via keywords (or known markers), or sometimes via analysis, but I couldn't find it in the README.
2. A compiler that works only on macOS?
h1fra3 hours ago
Vercel doing Vercel: 5 days old, entirely vibecoded, already 1.5k stars for no reason, solves no one's issue and will stop being maintained in a few months (if more than this week).
piterrro8 hours ago
this is enough to keep them on the first page of HN and similar services. Its a growth strategy: invest tokens, build some "nice" project nobody wants, get some reach through publishment. Rinse and repeat.
Heads up, in 12 months from now, 90% of open source projects will be vibecoded, without actual users - only looking "interesting" (if not already?).
Its easy to vibe code a full blown compiler these days, the question is: will it be maintained? A catchy title is not enough to get sticky users, long term maintenance, community around the project is (or at least used to be).
Having said that, the only viable reason for these kind of projects I see is getting attention for a moment, boosting reach of Vercel logo across the web and then disappearing (or stop development).
If Vercel would think seriously about this project: they would show skin in the game - for example implement it as their own experimental runtime.
sheept15 hours ago
One of the strengths of TypeScript besides its expressiveness is that it's compatible with the massive npm ecosystem. Most packages only ship untyped JavaScript with type declarations defining the interface,[0] so realistically you'd still need a JavaScript engine if you use any packages.
But if you're starting from scratch and know you won't be using any npm packages, you might as well use AssemblyScript.[2]
[0]: Publishing packages in TypeScript is explicitly discouraged by Node[1]. TypeScript isn't backwards compatible even in minor releases, and its compiler settings aren't portable for packages.
[1]: https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/main/doc/api/typescript....
simonw15 hours ago
> so realistically you'd still need a JavaScript engine if you use any packages.
Looks like Scriptc's solution to that problem is that it can optionally bundle a 620KB quickjs-ng JavaScript engine if you have dependencies that need to be executed that way.
skybrian9 hours ago
I would use it for a focused command-line tool that needs to share code with a larger TypeScript project, not for code with a lot of dependencies.
bbor15 hours ago
Those are good reasons to publish untyped libraries as a rule, sure. But the contention that those reasons outweigh the value of types kinda boggles the mind, ngl!
sroussey13 hours ago
Publishing a lib as JS with .d.ts type files gives you JS compatibility and TS types for using the lib, but no TS source so no types inside.
I’ve seen people want to publish TS libs but there are issues: TS will type check the libs as well as your project. You can’t tell it to stop just because it’s going inside node modules. And the app may have tighter settings than the library and you will get type errors if your configs were setup differently. It would be interesting to standardize publishing real typescript libs but I haven’t seen it. Maybe deno tried? I haven’t looked.
skybrian9 hours ago
When publishing on jsr.io, you upload the TypeScript, and if using Deno, you also download TypeScript (with import statements rewritten.) Having nearly the original source code is better for debugging.
Deno doesn’t type-check external dependencies unless you ask.
sroussey2 hours ago
With the exports rewritten? Maybe we should have a export of “ts” like we have “types” instead?
skybrianan hour ago
Not sure what you mean, but to expand on what I wrote, JSR rewrites the import statements to include file extensions and full version numbers for package dependencies, so that the imports can be resolved without looking for them in multiple places.
There's a way to download JSR packages and use them with npm too. I don't know what it does in that case.
daveidol8 hours ago
It’s too bad we didn’t start out with Deno
gajus3 hours ago
Excellent problem space.
Related problem: Using AI to write compilers that optimize runtime code. I did this for Zod.
https://github.com/gajus/zod-compiler
Zod schemas, compiled at build time into raw boolean chains. 2-74x faster. No code changes. The plugin swaps Zod with compiled parse.
I wrote almost none of the optimizations. Claude did, in a loop, over 100+ iterations.
It works because the compiled version can be diffed against real Zod. Correctness isn't a judgment call. Same as scriptc.
This applies to every program with a reference implementation and a benchmark. Compilers, serializers, formatters, query planners, etc.
Excited for faster Internet.
jjice3 hours ago
This is very interesting and a potential huge win like .NET AOT if it lasts. This has been around for days, so I'm not going to invest any more time than just playing with it at this point, but if this can continue development and not get abandoned, it could be a really nice win for the ecosystem.
As we see more and more heavily AI built open source projects, I wonder how the perception of them becomes. There's a huge spectrum of AI developed code, the same way there is with human code, except a human at least had to think a bit about what they wrote. If you generate code with an LLM to the standards that you'd write it yourself (which is the only way I'd consider for anything important) and you review every bit that's written, I think that's wonderful. Even if you don't, I don't think that's bad, but I will have more friction to adopt that project as there's likely lower quality code and less personal investment into it.
I find that a lot of online discussion has gone either "AI generate everything" or "never AI generate anything", with the middle ground being mostly silent. That's probably just because it's the internet and most people I talk to IRL have a reasonable middle ground take. I'm all for it if it accelerates a person making thoughtful decisions. If not, more power to you, but I'm less inclined to use the software out of fear of using something of poor quality or something that'll be abandonware.
weinzierl10 hours ago
It's nice they acknowledge and confirm the need for small, fast native executables.
Having followed the story for this in Java over the decades I'm skeptical about the practicality. GCJ existed in the 90s and the technology was good, but there was no ecosystem support.
After many small steps between GraalVM Native finally tackled the problem more holistically and the ecosystem followed. All the major libraries and frameworks put effort into being GraalVM compatible.
And, still it's a major pain to make even simple existing applications run flawlessly natively.
I'm glad something like scriptc exists but I'm afraid until this is of practical use it will be s long thorny way.
pjmlp9 hours ago
GCJ was always a prototype kind of.
Anyone serious would be paying for Excelsior JET, BEA JRockit, or the myriad of other commercial JDKs wihth AOT tooling.
In fact most likely one reasons why Excelsior is not more, is that now GraalVM and OpenJ9 exist as free bear.
PTC and Aicas still have it good, because few care about their embedded and real time customers.
luciana1u13 minutes ago
no JavaScript engine in the binary, but optionally bundles a 620KB quickjs runtime. giving up JavaScript but keeping a flask in the desk drawer.
elendilm10 hours ago
This look very promising.
We are increasingly using a subset of typescript in our backend so as to be amenable to a tool, in the long run, which can convert the ts subset to rust source code.
This project will enable an alternative of that vision earlier - except of course without the parallelism.
Also I am curious as to whether this will compile to a static lib which can be linked to an existing cpp app to be run on android/ios targets. In theory it should be able to. The docs mention ffi, but I didn't dig deep.
aluxian7 hours ago
Does that tool already exist, so do you have a specific TS subset in mind you are aiming for? Or you are simply trying to use fewer complex features?
notsylver10 hours ago
I desperately want to see some of these projects used in production by the companies or people making them, at best it might prove that it isn't just a sloppy publicity stunt
satvikpendem15 hours ago
A lot of people are trying this now with AI, a native TypeScript compiler, for example https://github.com/PerryTS/pry. It's a compelling value proposition, TypeScript is already well typed and barring a few cases it can be turned into machine code without a JS runtime.
[deleted]11 hours agocollapsed
chilipepperhott15 hours ago
It's difficult to ignore how the README is filled with Claudisms.
simonw15 hours ago
Looks like PRs are actively accepted. I just got rid of one of them! https://github.com/vercel-labs/scriptc/commit/c4b68dc6d9c259...
asdfsa3214 hours ago
This is like putting lipstick on a pig. Give me an AI written README or tests but actually thoughtful codebase over human written readme but aislop code any day of the month
binary13214 hours ago
Perhaps they should be left as a warning to others.
localhoster13 hours ago
Funny to see vercel is loosing all credibility under the influence of AI. Never liked their products anyway, so I believe it's a net positive for the industry :)
MrDrMcCoy10 hours ago
Hasn't quickjs and GraalVM been able to do this for a while now?
Also, does "Linux and Windows binaries build by cross-compilation" mean that you can't run it on non-MacOS? If so, that's pretty lame...
bLorax2 hours ago
It is technically possible to drink soup with a shovel but I don't really wanna do it.
I might be wrong here. What's the use case?
[deleted]7 hours agocollapsed
mapcars3 hours ago
Interesting, I wonder what does no-runtime option mean, no event loop and no async code then?
davexunit3 hours ago
This project is 5 days old going by the commit history and seems to be entirely vibecoded.
aabhay15 hours ago
178kb?! What are you putting in there, a JVM?
SkiFire1312 hours ago
You're 2-3 orders of magnitude off for a JVM
iansmith_hn8 hours ago
Agreed. Along those same lines, their startup time claim "faster than go", gives me concern because the slowest part of go startup is the various GC-related initializations. If they are doing GC, then you would assume their times would be broadly similar.
pdantix12 hours ago
another vercel labs thing that's been slopped together, hyped up on twitter and then left to be forgotten about in a few months time.
Twirrim12 hours ago
This is one of the things that is tiring me out the most. Previously people could have these "ohh shiny" ideas and would lose steam before they could be implemented, especially in areas they're clueless about.
Now people can have these ideas, slop together an awful solution that works at a surface level, maybe, but will never really go places because the foundation is slopped with no party involved actually capable of thinking thing through. But hey we launched something so let's make lots of noise! Oh look, a banana ... Sorry, what were we talking about?
There's an engineer on a team at work that I routinely engage with who slops together stuff so fast his team is basically exhausted all the time. They're stuck picking up a whole stream of pieces of crap because the engineer is incapable of actually doing the hard work of getting things to production because there's more "ohh, shiny" stuff they can spend tokens on, and their leadership aren't stepping in because it all looks terribly productive (it really isn't)
anta409 hours ago
Does this mean I can turn my JS-based backend into single executable and easily ship it, like in Go?
queenkjuul8 hours ago
Recent versions of Node can package a backend into a single binary already, it'll just be 100MB+ and embed the whole Node runtime.
This is more equivalent to Go, with a single static native binary that does not include the whole Node runtime
ianberdin8 hours ago
I've heard stories like this before, how one or a few people miraculously coded up an alternative to Node.js. But can you name even one that actually works properly in production? Not a single one.
Take Bun, for example. Nobody is actually running it in production as a runtime. Why? Memory leaks and a whole bunch of other issues. I've personally tried it multiple times, and something always breaks. Come on, it's just not that simple.
Sure, you can build something that has similar interfaces and even works to some degree. But making a production-ready solution is a completely different level of complexity. There's that well-known chart where the first 90% of implementation happens almost instantly, and the remaining 10% takes forever to polish out all the rough edges.
On one hand, I really like the idea, and I've always wondered why TypeScript doesn't compile to native code. On the other hand, I'm quite skeptical that Vercel can actually pull this off. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I have very little faith in it.
Either way, good luck to them, but honestly, even if they succeed, I probably won't use it. Knowing their track record with vendor lock-in and Next.js, where they do everything possible to push you onto Vercel Cloud — no thanks.
mdavid6267 hours ago
Sometimes you are forced to use it - e.g. Bun in Claude Code. I like Opus models, but can't run them outside of Claude Code/Bun in subscription models.
hnsmomdpvp7 hours ago
Not glamorous but it works
xiaodai14 hours ago
how can you compile it if javascript is a valid subset of typescript? confused.
panzi14 hours ago
Either it is only accepting a subset of TypeScript, or it is still interpreting the parts that don't have enough types. Given other comments here it sounds like the later.
lpribis7 hours ago
No idea about this project, but it is very possible to compile a dynamically typed language, without large VM/runtime. See Common Lisp, Julia
queenkjuul10 hours ago
Both, basically. Default is the subset, but you can enable an interpreter
CarpeNecopinus11 hours ago
What it can actually compile is a subset of well-behaved typescript. For anything else it bails out and asks you to ship a JS engine (albeit, not NodeJS) again.
truth_seeker10 hours ago
Shameless plug but worth reading :
I have forked Fabrice Bellards QuickJS and extended it heavily to adopt anti-npm/node stance.
all of the essential standard lib and top npm packages will be built natively in C17 with every build and minor release focred through CPU, IO and memory profiling.
Currently it supports MacOS and Linux, FreeBSD and Windows in future.
https://github.com/corporatepiyush/dynascript
API reference : https://github.com/corporatepiyush/dynascript/blob/master/do...
casper1415 hours ago
I like the idea.
[deleted]14 hours agocollapsed
techpression10 hours ago
Whatever happened with their new programming language for agents? I expect this will follow the same path.
relug10 hours ago
finally someone did this
khalic8 hours ago
Does it compiles to C? Wasm? I couldn’t find it the readme slop
simonw3 hours ago
It compiles to C if you use "--backend c"
Otherwise it looks like it compiles to LLVM.
zuzululu11 hours ago
this is interesting , so i can turn electron into a native app now?
whats the use case for this , make it hard to reverse engineer my node projects?
repeekad11 hours ago
Some of us don’t like Spotify, Slack, Discord, and a simple notes app taking 1-2GB of RAM each..
lpribis7 hours ago
Still need the entire browser DOM, APIs, layout, renderers, etc outside of JS.
jonasdoesthings10 hours ago
another use case is getting standalone self-contained binaries which are easier to ship.
other projects like claude code use something like `bun build --compile`[^1] for that, which instead of producing a small native binary just bundle the JS runtime into the executable.
isaachinman11 hours ago
This is a really important question. If true, it could end a lot of Electron wastefulness.
jorisw10 hours ago
Don’t see how compiling Typescript changes how little Electron cares about the host OS in terms of UI and how it just ships Chromium in order to show any UI at all
nkmnz8 hours ago
Nothing more horrible than apps that "care about the host OS in terms of UI", thus looking different on every type of device I have to use for work.
queenkjuul7 hours ago
Im 99% certain it cannot. This seems better suited to server side projects.
Deno is building a less-wasteful Electron style framework for native desktop apps
[deleted]13 hours agocollapsed
ontouchstart3 minutes ago
Interesting thread. I use Google AI (incognito mode on iPhone Safari) to discus this topic and manually copy and paste the conversation to a gist:
https://gist.github.com/ontouchstart/46316d23b0b2e772c247ee0...
Then I use the local llama.cpp + llama.cpp/gemma-4-12B-it-Q4_K_M + pi to read above gist and continue the (meta)discussion.
Here is the session export:
https://ontouchstart.github.io/2026/07/27/pi-session-2026-07...
Very entertaining and I have learned a lot.