Hacker News Reader

Comment by 52-6F-62 | Hacker News Reader

Worst case (MS moves to bad-acting), re: Deno—TypeScript can at least be forked for now https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript

I'd love to see Mozilla hop on board with it

View on HN

What happens when Typescript gets extended and able to compile down to C#? Then it just makes sense to use a .NET stack.

Javascript ecosystem extinguished. Everybody will forget how to write on the open web platform.

_Yawn_. Wake me up on this thread when Blink/Webkit switch to .NET from V8/JavaScriptCore. Javascript (and thus Typescript as a higher-order lang) is _useful_ on mobile (hi, react-native) and the desktop, sure, but we're clearly a _long_ way from replacing JS in the browser.

Witness the delightful, slow-motion failure to launch that was Dart...

I hope you are right, it took no time for Typescript to catch on, and got ordained in Deno.

And the Deno team moved from Golang to Rust for their implementation. Maybe that will result in some interesting developments.

I prefer to think of this as Ryan Dahl choosing Mozilla over Google, whatever the relative merits of Golang vs. Rust.

Not that it matters, but I think it's much more likely he chose Rust specifically for the language features over Go. A lot of Rust's type-system and semantics are inspired by ML-family languages which are well-known to be great for writing parsers, etc.

At the initial presentation, Ryan mentioned that a move from Go to Rust was a possibility due to a few things, and they were related to the languages themselves, not to Mozilla vs Google or something.

(And, IMHO, saying that Rust is a Mozilla thing is just plain incorrect.)

At this point I'd _rejoice_ if someone could offer a credible alternative to Javascript for web (and other browser-based/cross-platform mobile) dev. Google tried and utterly failed with Dart; Microsoft embraced JS via Typescript (extend and extinguish, sure, whatever; TS is fantastic); Facebook embraced JS via React (and React Native on mobile, though they've since pulled back a bit from that...); and Apple is predictably absent from the room.

There's pretty much no one left in the conversation who could credibly move us past an endless JS-only future of progressively-more-TS-like ES20XXs at this point...

It's sad to me that nobody would consider a new option unless a FAANG, or otherwise huge company, were backing it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com