Show HN: Ezno, a TypeScript checker written in Rust, is now open source

kaleidawave | 113 points

Very cool! Congrats on the launch, even if it is very early.

Unsolicited feedback: I read the name an Enzo (n-zo) until I read the readme and realized it was Ezno (es-no).

Since in a previous post [0] you say you're unsure on the name, Enzo could be a good one if this is a common mistake.

[0] https://kaleidawave.github.io/posts/introducing-ezno/

ZephyrBlu | 10 months ago

This is extremely early per the disclaimer at the top, like too early to even run most toy programs.

In general I'm kind of skeptical of the approach these rewrite in rust/go projects are going. Maybe as wasm plugins for hot paths in existing tools, but it's not clear to me that the full rewrites are where we want to be long term as a community.

esprehn | 10 months ago

I don't know what it is about this name but I just can't not read it as "enzo".

bin_bash | 10 months ago

Very cool! I'm curious, is this intended for dev tooling?

For example, I could see this (or something similar) being useful as the engine for a typescript language server that would be faster than the standard one

But if it's not aimed at 1:1 with tsc, would it be intended more for something like swc[1]?

Or what would you expect people to use this for, besides just being a cool project to learn from?

[1] https://github.com/swc-project/swc

pcthrowaway | 10 months ago

Discussion from when it was first announced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32941613 (2022-09-22, 175 points, 98 comments).

chrismorgan | 10 months ago

The issue has always been that people start these projects, see just how big/hard checking the whole of TypeScript is and don't finish it.

It would be awesome if you finished it :]

inglor | 10 months ago

I haven't looked at the source, but the way to write one of these that's fast is to use incremental computation. [0]

It tends to take a lot of RAM, but the speedups possible are 3-5 orders of magnitude in the projects I've studied.

Here's a parallel C++ library to do so that requires relatively minor changes to the original algorithm. [1] [2]

I also believe it would be possible to develop a compiler framework to do the transformation mostly automatically, using an MLIR dialect.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_computing

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3409964.3461799

[2] Source code: https://github.com/cmuparlay/psac

erichocean | 10 months ago

Does this have tsconfig support, or is it only checking on a per-file basis so far?

xnorswap | 10 months ago