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It’s already proven (esbuild, SWC, Bun) to drastically improve performance of TypeScript’s other responsibility: compilation (tsc doesn’t offer an option for this, but ts-node does, for comparison). And while the type checker is certainly more complex, I have a hard time imagining it won’t show similar improvements in a native language.

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Compiling typescript is basically just stripping the type definitions/annotations and other typescript-specific parts of the syntax out. That's a huge difference from actually type checking it.

And yet, it’s drastically slower in JavaScript than in Go, Rust and Zig. I realize different algorithms will optimize differently between JS and native code, but I sincerely doubt tsc is anywhere near optimal speed.

That's mostly because tsc's parser is used by the JS implementations.

Writing a parser for the purpose would achieve performance closer to the other implementations.

esbuild, SWC, and Bun are not ports of existing programs.

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