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It's kind of funny but also depressing watching all the frontend people try to force Javascript onto the backend. They've been slowly rewriting their tooling us

It's kind of funny but also depressing watching all the frontend people try to force Javascript onto the backend. They've been slowly rewriting their tooling using more suitable languages: - esbuild (Go) is 100x faster than webpack and friends - Bun (Zig) and Deno (Rust) are ~2x faster than Node - Typescript recently announced a rewrite in Go for an expected 10x performance gain Maybe one day they'll realize that those languages are good for more than developer tooling? Maybe they can even be used for serving web content?

worik 1y ago
> Typescript recently announced a rewrite in Go for an expected 10x performance gain Really? Why use Typescript at all, in that case? I really do not know
- riknos314 1y ago
  The improvement is in `tsc`, the type checker. The improvement is reduced build times and thus faster developer or agent cycle times.
- selljamhere 1y ago
  The Typescript compiler, currently JavaScript, is being rewritten in Go. The 10x performance gain is in build time, which is still a major speedup and will shrink the development loop.
bluelightning2k 1y ago
Couple things: First, perf you mention is from fundamentally CPU intensive workloads, not a sparse async environment like a typical server. Second (far more important) the reason we do this is type safety. We don't want types to break at the handover or to maintain them twice. We eliminate a huge category of issues and mental overhead. This maintainability and simplicity is worth more (to me at least) than perf. As a bonus there's also directly shared utils, classes etc. which again can be reused across client/server but more importantly stay in sync.
- throw1111221 1y ago
  I am curious, how do you handle version skew between frontend / backend when you're reusing code + types?
  - GianFabien 1y ago
    I design solutions so that there is a distinct frontend and backend. Instead of reuse, common code gets shared. Yes, it does take a bit of fiddling to get the architecture to support that. But once you get it bedded down, it becomes just a matter of conventions.
pjmlp 1y ago
More depressing is those of us that would rather use Java, C#, basically any JVM or .NET language, or even if it must really be, Go, but have to bother dealing with nodejs instead, because reasons.

worik 1y ago

> Typescript recently announced a rewrite in Go for an expected 10x performance gain Really? Why use Typescript at all, in that case? I really do not know

riknos314 1y ago
The improvement is in `tsc`, the type checker. The improvement is reduced build times and thus faster developer or agent cycle times.
selljamhere 1y ago
The Typescript compiler, currently JavaScript, is being rewritten in Go. The 10x performance gain is in build time, which is still a major speedup and will shrink the development loop.

bluelightning2k 1y ago

Couple things: First, perf you mention is from fundamentally CPU intensive workloads, not a sparse async environment like a typical server. Second (far more important) the reason we do this is type safety. We don't want types to break at the handover or to maintain them twice. We eliminate a huge category of issues and mental overhead. This maintainability and simplicity is worth more (to me at least) than perf. As a bonus there's also directly shared utils, classes etc. which again can be reused across client/server but more importantly stay in sync.

throw1111221 1y ago
I am curious, how do you handle version skew between frontend / backend when you're reusing code + types?
- GianFabien 1y ago
  I design solutions so that there is a distinct frontend and backend. Instead of reuse, common code gets shared. Yes, it does take a bit of fiddling to get the architecture to support that. But once you get it bedded down, it becomes just a matter of conventions.

pjmlp 1y ago

More depressing is those of us that would rather use Java, C#, basically any JVM or .NET language, or even if it must really be, Go, but have to bother dealing with nodejs instead, because reasons.