Ah took me a while to understand the reason behind this.
It wasn’t “let’s build a faster Rust based Typescript compiler” at all. That was a nice side-effect.
They needed a Typescript compiler that can run on their WASM only sandbox. So the only existing option was to export tsc Go to WASM, but that comes with the full Go runtime.
And to avoid that cost, they experimented with a Rust compiler and turns out it’s even faster than the reference tsc/Go implementation.
> It wasn’t “let’s build a faster Rust based Typescript compiler” at all. That was a nice side-effect.
Then why are the performance graphs the headliner topic in the article? The WASM sandbox is barely a footnote.
Another reason: type aware listing in oxlint.
Oxlint already has type-aware linting, integrated with TS7/typescript-go.
Yeah but now it can just all be in rust, which is a lot simpler.