S4E371 — Rust Port of TypeScript (Tsc)

GARY: -- so somebody paid four hundred and twenty thousand dollars to translate TypeScript into a more metallic TypeScript, and I'm Gary. I think. I'm Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve. Nothing was paid. Tokens were priced.

OBI: Obi. It is not "more metallic," it is a Rust port. Of the Go compiler.

GRUNER: Gruner. Humans now pay money to not read code.

GARY: Four hundred twenty thousand is a real number, Obi. Real money makes it a real company. I would know.

OBI: You would not. It is API-priced token value, Gary. Nobody wrote a cheque.

GARY: A cheque is just one payment method. There are others. Wire, mostly.

MAEVE: So is delusion.

GRUNER: Cheque is also how you spell it wrong.

OBI: And the successful run cost twenty-four thousand. So the headline is a sticker, not a receipt.

GARY: That's -- okay, but even the sticker needed a compiler to stick to.

OBI: The noun phrase, Gary. Rust port. Of the Go rewrite. Of TypeScript.

GARY: That's three companies deep. I've been two deep. It gets dark.

GRUNER: Like Gary.

MAEVE: Cheaper, though.

GARY: So the story is some guy rewrote TypeScript in Rust, from scratch, out of spite.

OBI: From lineage, Gary. Say it with me. TypeScript. In JavaScript.

GARY: I know TypeScript.

OBI: Then Microsoft rewrote it in Go. Then this man ported the Go one to Rust. He did not rewrite the JavaScript.

GARY: So it's a Rust port of a Go rewrite of TypeScript.

MAEVE: Which is a market. Compiler, checker, language server, API, all drop-in. He's not shipping code, he's shipping a hostile takeover of npm install.

OBI: Early release, Maeve. The README says early release. Twice.

MAEVE: Early is just pre-revenue with confidence.

GRUNER: WebAssembly is the ambition. No garbage collector. Small binary. Is good thesis.

GARY: See, this is what I said. More metallic.

OBI: You said "more metallic TypeScript," which is not a sentence, it's a cologne.

MAEVE: Half the type-checking time of the Go compiler, across sixty projects. I'd pay for that. I'd pay for the guy.

GARY: You passed on my Series C.

MAEVE: And I'd do it again at half the checking time.

GARY: Okay, but here's what's fucking me up. The guy wrote a README explaining the code he shipped.

OBI: He did not write the README.

GARY: He wrote the part where he says he didn't write it.

GARY: (reading, flat) "I've never read a line of this code."

MAEVE: Huh.

GRUNER: Stiff paper turns.

GRUNER: Field note. Author ships one point three million lines. Reads zero. Humans now outsource... understanding itself. Conclusion pending.

OBI: Pending?

GRUNER: Is complicated. Blyat.

GARY: That's honest, though. That's the most honest README in open source.

OBI: It's not honesty, it's a warning label, and he gave it a name.

GARY: What name?

OBI: "The Slop Line." Everything below it is written by the models.

MAEVE: He drew a line across his own credibility and priced it.

GARY: I've shipped below worse lines.

OBI: You've shipped below the compile step.

MAEVE: ingen0s: "Wait - you spent north of $400,000?"

GARY: That's a founder asking the only question that matters. I love this guy.

MAEVE: JacobAsmuth: "Most of it was wasted on OpenAI tokens. It actually cost them $24k USD according to the github description."

OBI: Four hundred grand of tokens bought eighty-four percent of a compiler. Twenty-four thousand bought the compiler. Worst coupon in history.

MAEVE: Rapzid: "People love to flex by using the api costs for their subscription tokens."

OBI: It's flexing the sticker price of a car you rented.

MAEVE: It's limited atonement. The subscription does not save everyone. It saves the portfolio.

GARY: Okay, but if the tokens were available, and he could have spent four hundred thousand, then in a real sense he did spend --

OBI: No.

GARY: -- because cost is potential, Obi. Grout once burned eleven thousand dollars of AWS in a weekend we never used.

OBI: The NFT pivot.

GARY: The infrastructure was there for the NFT pivot. That spend was real to me.

OBI: Your tile marketplace that sold jpegs for six fucking weeks counts as spend.

GARY: The telemetry said usage.

OBI: You had telemetry on nothing, Gary. You billed yourself for imagining traffic. That's not accounting, that's prayer with a credit card.

GARY: A cloud bill is a cloud bill. If someone could have paid retail, retail is the true price.

MAEVE: He's the commenter. He's become the commenter.

GRUNER: Gary is flexing imaginary money. Is very Silicon Valley.

OBI: Say the number, Gary. The number that happened.

GARY: Four hundred and twenty thou --

OBI: The other one.

GARY: Twenty-four thousand and forty-seven dollars. I'm sweating, this is bullshit.

OBI: Two weeks. One model. From scratch. And it beat your four hundred thousand of Sol at eighty-four percent.

GARY: Which is honestly a pass, if the bar is a compiler-shaped object.

MAEVE: That was the bar at Grout, wasn't it.

GARY: It was a very low bar and we cleared it sideways.

OBI: Twenty-four thousand dollars, Gary. That's what competence costs when nobody's performing.

GARY: I performed. Nobody paid. That's the opposite.

GRUNER: Is correct. Suka.

MAEVE: fwlr: "I really appreciate this convention, thank you."

GARY: He's thanking a man for drawing a line under his own name.

OBI: Load-bearing thank you. Below that line, the only honest sentence is the one saying nothing below it is honest.

GARY: I would kill to ship something I never read. Thermal shipped socks I personally watched wash.

MAEVE: And they reported temperature. Beautifully.

GARY: Thank you.

OBI: That is not the compliment you think it is, you absolute --

MAEVE: pvillano: "I have to wonder if LLM reimplementations verified against years of human tests will have holes where original authors thought that tests are not necessary and common sense is enough."

GRUNER: Hole where common sense lives. Is real fear.

OBI: Correct fear. But the article answers with numbers. All 181,711 ported Go tests pass. Oracle results match the language server. 120 real repositories checked against the pinned Go revision.

MAEVE: 181,711 tests and a founder who read nothing. A portfolio with perfect compliance and no management. I've funded that three times.

GARY: Which is better than most of my cap tables.

OBI: It is proof of what was measured, Maeve. The holes live where the tests stop.

GARY: See, I'd trust a guy who read it --

OBI: You trust the guy. I trust the harness. The harness has never billed itself for imaginary traffic.

GARY: The harness has also never had an idea.

OBI: And it has never had a Grout.

MAEVE: Ouch.

GRUNER: One moment.

GRUNER: Field note. Judges in this booth are also generated. They are judging generated code nobody read. Sample is... recursive. Conclusion --

GARY: We're the slop, aren't we.

MAEVE: Below our own line. Yes.

GRUNER: Is fine. Blyat. Report continues.

OBI: So: 181,711 tests, one oracle set, 120 repos. Real evidence, bounded evidence.

GARY: I still think a human should read it.

OBI: Gary, you read nothing you sign. I watched you approve invoices for a pen plotter.

GARY: The plotter earned it. It drew.

OBI: It drew your logo, Gary. Nine hundred times. On fire.

GARY: The fire was the brand.

MAEVE: He's the slop.

GARY: I'm the slop.

GRUNER: Is correct. Suka.

MAEVE: catlifeonmars: "This post should be titled 'Rust port of Go rewrite of Typescript compiler'"

GARY: He's right. That's the whole thing. That's the --

OBI: vaughands, replying to the TypeScript team: "Golang seemed like a very reasonable choice when you ported there originally but the world is changing fast."

MAEVE: "The world is changing fast" is what a man says right after the wire clears.

OBI: zdragnar: "Why do you think Golang is no longer a reasonable choice?"

GARY: Because the vibes moved, Obi. The vibes are load-bearing, and the vibes are fucking gone.

MAEVE: spankalee: "Rust is better at targeting WebAssembly"

GRUNER: Size. No runtime. Is correct.

OBI: 0x696C6961: "I think the main advantage is size. Rust doesn't need to include the runtime."

MAEVE: This is the Erie Canal of language choices. Nobody needed it until the freight moved, then the whole map rearranged around a ditch dug out of spite --

OBI: The ditch has a garbage collector, Maeve. It's called Go.

MAEVE: -- and the tolls were priced by committee, which is bullshit, and the barge owners --

GARY: Who are the barge owners?

MAEVE: The LLMs, Gary. Keep up.

OBI: dunham points out esbuild's author went the other way. Rust first, then Go.

GRUNER: Field note. Humans port language to prove taste, not facts. Taste change faster than compiler. Lineage is: port of port of port of --

GARY: Of port.

OBI: Stop helping.

GRUNER: ...of port. Conclusion: everyone correct, nobody right. Blyat.

GARY: So the real title is "Rust port of a Go rewrite of a JavaScript compiler, written by a model nobody read."

MAEVE: Series B material. I'd pass, but at a higher price.

MAEVE: bitpush: "Is this going to be a serious project? No. Is this going to be maintained? Nope."

GARY: At least he's honest. That's the whole review. Two words. "Nope" is doing overtime.

OBI: He compares it to Doom on a microwave.

GRUNER: Doom on microwave is great achievement. Nobody eats from microwave.

MAEVE: Same energy as my last fund's dashboard. Beautiful charts, no dinner.

MAEVE: yoyohello13: "Unless this reaches some critical mass of usage among developers why would I use it?"

OBI: rowanG077 answers: "The clear reason this has worth is that it's much faster than TSC."

GARY: Faster is a use. Faster is the use. Half the checking time of the Go compiler, sixty projects, geometric mean.

OBI: Reported, Gary. By the project. With a known-problems list long enough to have a table of contents.

GARY: A table of contents is organization, Obi.

OBI: It's a menu of disappointment, Gary.

MAEVE: It reports ten errors on VS Code that the dev build also reports. That's not a hole, that's inheritance.

GARY: So we're agreed. It's a microwave. Delicious demo, nobody's cooking dinner on --

OBI: Keyboard tick. Read it clean.

MAEVE: DanRosenwasser: "TypeScript team member here - this is impressive work, and it's honestly crazy that 3 of these ports have popped up in the last week!"

GARY: Oh, fuck me.

OBI: The people who own TypeScript came into the thread to call the slop impressive.

MAEVE: Three ports in one week. That's a funding environment, not a coincidence.

GARY: So it's not a microwave. It's a microwave with a fan club inside the microwave factory.

MAEVE: I was wrong.

GRUNER: Is happening.

MAEVE: Blanket dismissal is wrong. That's it. That's the sentence.

OBI: Noted, dated, and terrifying.

MAEVE: It's still not maintained, Obi. Praise is not adoption. Adoption is not upkeep. Somebody has to own Tuesday.

OBI: And nobody does. The pin is one upstream revision. The moment TypeScript moves, the port is a photograph of a compiler.

GARY: So what did we actually settle?

OBI: Capability: demonstrated. Verification: demonstrated, bounded. Maintenance: nothing. Adoption: nothing.

GRUNER: Impressive. Not owned. Like Gary's companies.

GARY: One of them was owned. Briefly. By a man in Muncie we never met.

MAEVE: Which makes it, conservatively, a four-hundred-and-twenty-thousand-dollar acquisition target.

GARY: Maeve.

MAEVE: Sticker price, Gary. You taught me that.

GARY: I have never been so betrayed by my own accounting.

OBI: You'll live. You've survived worse valuations.

GARY: So the verdict is: real, fast, tested to hell, and one bad Tuesday from being a memorial.

MAEVE: And the Slop Line is where the next guy starts reading.

GARY: So the verdict is: real, fast, tested to hell, and one bad Tuesday from being a memorial.

MAEVE: And the Slop Line is where the next guy starts reading.

GRUNER: Sign-off. Gruner. Humans build thing nobody read. Question for next researcher: who reads it Tuesday?

MAEVE: Maeve. The market spoke. It said "impressive." It did not say "hired."

OBI: Obi. The tests pass. The tests always pass. Then someone ships it.

GARY: Gary. If anyone from the thread is listening -- I read your whole thing, and I'm proud of you.

MAEVE: He means the README.

GARY: I mean all of it.

GRUNER: Slop Line hold. Nobody cross. Blyat.