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Comment by juancampa | Hacker News Reader

On a related note: Is there anyone working on a faster tsc? I know there's esbuild and swc, but those only transpile, they don't type-check.

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We also need a faster language server. Inference (e.g.[1]) is one of the greatest features of TS, but we're told not to use it.

[1]: https://trpc.io/

I absolutely love tRPC.

Rome (written in Rust) is trying to be a faster tsc (amongst other things, like a faster webpack, babel, prettier, etc)

https://rome.tools/#development-status

Rome’s journey is effectively over - the founders couldn’t make it work after raising a VC round, and I wouldn’t expect it to go GA.

What do you mean by "make it work"? They've raised 4.5M last year, did they just burn through that?

It appears from their repo that they have 5-6 people working full time on this. Assuming about 250k per developer that puts their burn at 6 * 250k = 1.5 million a year. So yeah they have some time. Although I would be severely concerned at their progress considering it’s already been a year and they don’t seem to have shipped much. No proof of PMF or any sort of revenue with over a third of their runway depleted should have them hustling to get on the boards.

The repo still looks pretty active, which seems contrary to your statement.

If you're looking for evidence in the public repo, consider what's not in there: one co-founder is missing, and so are the commits from the other author/co-founder for over a year. Not the signals you want in a dev-tooling project.

Or you could look to see if new work is being released. Most recent one was just 17 days ago.

https://twitter.com/rometools/status/1567169157891776514

Except how many users do they have? If I were a VC fund looking to give them another round, I’d want to know their metrics, whether that’s users, downloads, or revenue. Judging by their blog, it’s been a year since they raised the money. Have they produced anything other than a bunch of code? Because code isn’t worth much without users.

I found it interesting that a good chunk of outside contributions[1] happened before funding, and have almost completely stopped.

[1] https://github.com/rome/tools/graphs/contributors

It was just an experiment, but this person was (and is still doing related stuff): https://twitter.com/MarcJSchmidt/status/1551961839394865152

(and an example: https://twitter.com/MarcJSchmidt/status/1552781654065905664)

Based on the release notes, the Typescript team is working on faster type-checking as continuous goal and has many big long-term irons in that fire. Though a lot of the more recent work has gotten into the performance of projects already scaled into project references and incremental builds, so it may not yet be obvious how much work has gone into performance if you consider your projects small/medium-sized.

It can sometimes be quite an effort to refactor a medium sized project into project references with incremental builds and there's currently no obvious moment where Typescript knows to tell you "you've got a 'large' project now, if you split this workspace into multiple tsconfig projects that smartly reference each other and switched to incremental build flags you'd get a bunch of performance improvements". So that's still a matter of figuring it out for your own projects if you can take advantage of that (and how you would take advantage of that).

Yep! The person who started swc is doing just that:

https://kdy1.dev/posts/2022/1/tsc-go

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