alt Hacker Newsthe real story here is an incredible team that managed to simultaneously keep two separate codebases alive for the most advanced type system known to mankind (yeahhh yeahh Hindley-Milner eat your heart out).
huge congrats to the team!
looking forward to the Rust rewrite ;)
Replies
Most complex, perhaps, but not "most advanced". I don't think there's necessarily a meaningful "correct" choice for that title, but surely one of the proof assistant languages would be a more likely candidate?
(I don't say this to be disparaging of TypeScript's type system, by any means — it's very interesting stuff!)
> for the most advanced type system known to mankind
Honest question, what do you mean by this?
Steve Francia (author of Hugo and a bunch of other top Go projects) wrote up some thoughts of Go's fit in the agentic era:
They picked Go after meaningfully considering Rust (and others). I don't remember all the reasons for it but it was detailed in the original blog post.
Algorithm W is like undergrad level of sophistication. People who like HM more (and I am one) don't like it because it's "advanced" and to some extent exactly because it isn't. It's sound and fast and infers almost everything. TS seems to have one of those features now, so that's nice.
> most advanced type system known to mankind (yeahhh yeahh Hindley-Milner eat your heart out)
This TypeScript release is largely about performance. Isn't OCaml still at least twice as fast (and maybe even faster for incremental compilation on very large codebases)?
I am not sure a rust rewrite would be meaningful.
Go is great because it's fast to code.It's easy to reimplement typescript in go 1:1 just by looking at the code.
Rust on the other hand would take a lot longer to develop.
Maybe rust is 20% faster than go but overall the increase from typescript with go is good enough.
Maybe rust would yield a 14 times speedup over the 11 times in vscode but go is already good enough to make a huge difference.