Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

The thing with all those projects is playing catch-up with upstream, and the possible variations from what is actually the official semantics depending on the TypeScript version.

View on HN

Personally I wouldn't fret about keeping pace with upstream. Eventually the syntax will stabilize if it hasn't already. I'd be more worried about fidelity--does this produce the same result as the reference implementation? TFA says he's running against the "conformance" test suite, so that should keep things pretty tight and when bugs are found they'll be fixed in time and presumably the test suite will be updated accordingly.

The `conformance` suite is the "set of tests people added when a feature was first released", usually without the decade of following regression tests in the `compiler` suite. In TS itself, the `conformance` and `compiler` suite are considered the part of the same unit most of the time. (The compiler suite, however, is not helpfully subdivided by feature, since it oft deals with cross-cutting concerns!)

> Eventually the syntax will stabilize if it hasn't already.

Every language in wide use today is still evolving and, if anything, it seems that the pace of language change is generally increasing.

Some amount of evolution is fine, and I think your “pace of language change is increasing” may be true for some languages and time scales, but most languages don’t change more in their second five years than their first.

If OP delivers on the preliminary 62x speed up, how could upstream justify not jumping ship to OP’s implementation? Certainly the user base will demand it.

Being Microsoft, they would rather make use of their Typescript compiler for IoT, yet they haven't.

https://makecode.com/language

Reply on news.ycombinator.com