Tsrs: A Port of TypeScript to Rust

AbuAssar

According to voidzero, this port is up to 8x faster than TS 7.0 & ~70% less memory. Microsoft should seriously consider porting typescript to rust at this point

Leynos

So that's three now. This, tsgo-rs, and `bun check`

tonyhart7

I thought its TS port of theo

retropragma

please support TSRX ( https://github.com/tsrx-org/tsrx )

jdw64

These days the trend seems to be rewriting everything in Rust.

egonschiele

It's exciting to see the speed gains. I use TypeScript every day on a large codebase, and it is too slow to run locally. I don't love this change though: > However, frontier AI models can now do large-scale ports almost independently in a matter of days > I wrote zero code. Not "barely any". Zero So we are going to move from a carefully handwritten port to an entirely AI-generated port. I know this is the way the industry is headed, I use coding agents a ton. But I still review their output because they often don't make sound architectural decisions. Maybe this is a sign that my way of working is going away. I'm not sure how to justify that kind of time spent when someone can do the same thing in a matter of days with barely any effort. I am working on my own language now, I've spent most of this year on it. The idea that someone could just replace it in a matter of days is wild. Wonder how the TS team at Microsoft feels about this.

wannabe44

Y'all building the same thing.

frangonf

I use oxc tooling and it's great to see the rust rewrite singularity in action and get to ride the fastest horses, but I would like that they made a branch for 7.2 as experiment to see how it compares. Maybe this ends in a win for Microsoft, they could cut operating expenses by keeping just Anders Hejlsberg in a hammock reciting invariants to claudpilot.

norman784

I'm tired of all the new tools that comes out every day, but I would say, this is basically the Vite team and if they implement it with Vite+, then I'm all for it, less decisions about tooling to be made, one config file, etc.

nsm

Obligatory reminder that their needs from a TS compiler are extremely different from a regular web developers iteration cycle. They are trying to run millions of these while saving on costs. You almost definitely don't need to immediately plan to switch.

sheepscreek

Ah took me a while to understand the reason behind this. It wasn’t “let’s build a faster Rust based Typescript compiler” at all. That was a nice side-effect. They needed a Typescript compiler that can run on their WASM only sandbox. So the only existing option was to export tsc Go to WASM, but that comes with the full Go runtime. And to avoid that cost, they experimented with a Rust compiler and turns out it’s even faster than the reference tsc/Go implementation.

nalekberov

Oh god, I wish this Rust fetishism would end soon.

DanRosenwasser

Hey there, TypeScript team member here. The tsrs project has been extremely interesting to see come together. We've been working with the maintainers to better understand how tsrs is fast and what sorts of optimizations it uses are safe. We even did our own Rust vibe port and what we currently suspect is that a lot of the speed does not just come down to language choice, and some of what is going to make TS 7.1 faster and leaner (see the charts in the blog post) actually comes from optimizations discovered in tsrs. We think the wasm and oxlint integration makes a lot of sense for Cloudflare's needs, so this investment makes sense. At the same time, we'll be working hard and collaborating to make the official TypeScript toolset faster and even more efficient. Congrats to the tsrs team on making this official. We're excited and we look forward to continuing on collaboration!

afdbcreid

It appears they're using a unique memory model ( https://github.com/oxc-project/tsrs/blob/main/docs/PORTING.m... ) to overcome the challenge that prevented the TypeScript team from choosing Rust to begin with: Rust has no GC and porting from a GC language to it often requires restructure of data. Essentially, they fake a GC via never-freed arenas for long-living objects. It's interesting that Rust can do that (hopefully soundly)!

gzapp

Shameless plug of my Typescript C# port. It's a case study with some interesting (perhaps) notes from me in the README about approach, performance, and cost(~$75). https://github.com/stepwisehq/typescript-dotnet

jscheel

I benchmarked tsrs a few weeks ago. I was testing out tsgo, ts-rust, tsrs, and bun for typechecking on our monorepo. tsrs is definitely awesome, it is very memory efficient when bumping up the number of threads. Not as efficient as bun, but it has incremental checks, which bun does not have.

g0ld3nrati0

so rust is now go-to slop language? can't you guys use C or something. I want rust back.

panzi

I wonder how fast "Doom in TypeScript" runs in tsrs now. XD

jrop

What strange times. A few years ago seeing a headline like this, my jaw would have literally dropped. Instead I'm wondering what kind of software projects will have meaning in the future if this headline feels common.

sinameraji

this is insane! saw a quote tweet of this by an infra engineer at chat gpt who said “ I'm looking at migrating over for the ChatGPT codebase and saw ~70% improvements on both wall time perf + peak cpu/memory usage. this is great for getting work done faster but also much better if you want to run concurrent agents/worktrees at scale”. https://x.com/feedthejim/status/2112584843368570921?s=46 then i went and tried this on my own open source harness. type checking went from 10 seconds to under half a second and uses a quarter of the memory. madness