alt Hacker NewsFirst 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/ 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
Replies
> 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
Does tsonic have debugging support of any kind and how fast is the compiler?
Hey 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?