Perry Compiles TypeScript directly to executables using SWC and LLVM

https://www.perryts.com/

by 0x1997 • 2 months ago

125 104 2 months ago

perryts.com

0x1997• 2 months ago

https://github.com/PerryTS/perry

koteelok2• 2 months ago

The screenshots in the showcase look goofy

evil_buzzard• 2 months ago

the claim of "no runtime" is a bit dubious... you're telling me that you're statically linking a full, modern UI library into every app?

avaer2• 2 months ago

A runtime is needed for GC, unless you're fundamentally changing Javascript. Even golang has a runtime.

pjmlp5• 2 months ago

Even C has one, regardless of how tiny it happens to be, or the possibility of freestanding deployment.

In compiler speak, a runtime provides all infrastructure required by the language for program startup, shutdown, infrastructure for the standard library execution.

satvikpendem3• 2 months ago

They probably are, given that's how Flutter and other Rust GUI frameworks work too.

skibz• 2 months ago

Its documentation mentions a garbage collector.

https://docs.perryts.com/language/supported-features.html#ga...

ryanshrott• 2 months ago

Static linking just puts the runtime inside the binary. The binary size is the real clue here.

amlug7• 2 months ago

Yes. One that makes use of the underlying UI library for the specific system (macOS UI, Win32 UI, GTK4, ....)

The Perry runtime is surprisiginly small, especially since we (LLVM rather) strip out all that is no needed in one of the compile steps.

afavour2• 2 months ago

Fascinating. I've written cross platform (WASM, iOS, Android) libraries with Rust before and had a good time but Rust can be a pain too. Cross-platform Typescript is a really interesting proposition.

That said, the more I think about it the more dubious I am. The site boasts no runtime dependencies but clearly it’s going to need things like a garbage collector, you can’t just magic that requirement away. At a certain point is it just doing what a JS engine’s JIT compilation does… except ahead of time?

Also doesn't inspire confidence that the text on the site is very clearly AI generated and the GitHub log shows an endless stream of AI powered commits. About 15 per hour, every hour? Doesn’t scream stability.

__s2• 2 months ago

tbf Rust also can spit out pretty big binaries for small programs

afavour2• 2 months ago

Agreed. You can optimize things a fair amount with the Rust compiler, at least.

metaquestions• 2 months ago

how do one tell when text is ai generated - honest question. What are the tell tale signs?

leidenfrost• 2 months ago

In regards to the site, all of them follow almost the same templates.

Once you see a few, it becomes obvious

mirekrusin3• 2 months ago

if /comprehensive/ then ai

microtonal• 2 months ago

Not X, not Y, just Z.

The whole site is very jarring to read.

firtoz• 2 months ago

vibrant colours that don't match

X. Y. SUPER Z. heading

X. Y. SUPER Z. in subheading

excessive purple and gradients

--> arrows

cards, cards, cards, cards

doesn't just X, emdash, it [SUPER Y]

more cards

ridiculous awful contrast in copy that makes things unreadable (grey on black etc)

Alifatisk2• 2 months ago

I use this website, https://tropes.fyi/vetter, it apparently detectes Perry as pure ai slop website.

There is also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

networked• 2 months ago

I have collected some links about AI's writing style and how to recognize it: https://dbohdan.com/ai-writing-style. You can start with https://buildingalone.substack.com/p/your-words.

The most reliable automatic detector right now must be https://www.pangram.com/. If Pangram says something is AI, it is very likely AI. Sometimes it concludes more unusual AI text is human-written; Talkie tricks it! (https://x.com/aliceisplaying/status/2059778915275567129.)

queenkjuul3• 2 months ago

It's the UI design that screams it for me -- i didn't even read anything, the initial page load just screeched "AI design". There are definite cliches in web UI that they always go for. I'd be hard pressed to fully explain it all here but if you take note, you'll see many more sites with the same pattern (like click any of the example apps on the homepage--they have practically identical website design)

Eta: gradients on text, gradients everywhere, monospace badges, cards for everything, emojis everywhere...

Perry and Hone and the dB meter link all have the same homepage with slightly different spin

koteelok2• 2 months ago

Calling a couple million lines of ai written Rust "stable software" is a bold statement

fooker7• 2 months ago

vibeware :)

__s2• 2 months ago

Curious where on spectrum compiling to wasm falls between art project & optimization potential. Should be able to make some nice interfaces between TS-wasm & TS-web

madanparas2• 2 months ago

Perry uses NaN-boxing to preserve TypeScript's dynamic type system at runtime, the same approach as JavaScriptCore. The PERF_ROADMAP is honest about the cost: 1.86x behind Zig on image convolution, with 1.24 billion wasted instructions traced specifically to NaN-box unboxing. You cannot get C-level performance without dropping TypeScript semantics, and dropping them means you are no longer compiling TypeScript.

Dylan168072• 2 months ago

I think you mean you can't get that performance without monomorphization. When you know the types you can...

...wait, I went and looked up that file.

"The Three Optimizations That Would Close the Gap"

You're presenting the data from there in an extremely misleading way! They in no way need to drop any Typescript semantics to go faster.

madanparas2• 2 months ago

You're right. The typed buffer locals optimization keeps TypeScript semantics intact by exploiting the existing Buffer/Uint8Array type annotation to skip the NaN-unbox. It's not dropping types, it's using them. The floor I described applies to any-typed paths where static type info isn't available. For well-typed TypeScript, the roadmap shows the gap closes without semantic changes.

cornholio2• 2 months ago

Typescript is a dynamic language. Without changing the language, there is fundamentaly no way to resolve at compile time decisions that can be made only at runtime (ie, they are data driven). Monomorphization helps pin down (some) dynamic types but the fundamental problem remains.

smasher1642• 2 months ago

I'm not against AI usage but the website, documentation, and even the comments the creator (proggeramlug) makes in response to questions are all very clearly AI-generated. Also, as someone else noticed, the pacing of the commits is eerily fast. That combined with the level of functionality makes me dubious how much accountability the creators have over the implementation.

Like you really built a backend that lowers to LLVM, integrated it with a generational gc, wrote a cross-platform reactive runtime, and built support for eleven different targets within like a year? Are you just prompting the model to tack on the next coolest thing or do you understand how these features work?

I worry how many of these kinds of projects will show up now. How do you guarantee stability? If there's a memory corruption error in the GC implementation, who's going to debug it?

fooker7• 2 months ago

This is how software development works now. We have to live with it.

The models are good enough that this works.

You can keep disagreeing for a while, but know that almost all the code in the industry is written like this now.

rzmmm2• 2 months ago

I have used AI agents extensively for coding and my experience is that it's fine for prototypes, but in large projects like this there is risk that the codebase becomes unmaintainable.

manquer• 2 months ago

Trust of a project long term always was and continues to be of concern when choosing a critical dependency .

The concern basically boils down to how large and serious is the team and what if they abandon the project in few weeks or months .

These were always the risks, many here have been burned by betting years of their career building against promising but what turned out to be weak projects

OP is alluding to the fact that today commit frequency, lines of code or how active the contributors in the issue trackers are no longer good signals to use as proxy.

When the underlying project to yours is few million lines of code written by machines only it is not going to be feasible fork and maintain or in-house it if the maintainers abandon it

To be clear users of a library or a tool aren’t owed anything when it available gratis and fully open source .

However not everyone has access to unlimited tokens to disregard the quality (in terms of history and usage ) or size of the underlying project completely

pjmlp5• 2 months ago

Not at all, I can assert that the Spring code on my current project is classical programming.

In many places AI tools aren't even allowed to touch customer repos.

Nathanba2• 2 months ago

where exactly do you see comments by proggeramlug?

smasher1642• 2 months ago

On other sites, like github and reddit. This exchange was funny though. He eventually gets called out by the other commenter to stop responding with an LLM: https://github.com/PerryTS/perry/issues/139#issuecomment-429...

amlug7• 2 months ago

Hey smasher164,

thanks for bringing up the concern. I am proggeramlug (or amlug, either way), Ralph, founder of perry.

Yes, Perry is heavily AI-assisted - similar to the Bun to Rust port is too. Your concern is real and I don't claim to have all the answers for that.

I do know that AI is much better at finding bugs when it comes to compilers than most humans will ever be. Decoding bytecode and knowing what it should be is nothing humans are good at - AI does it trivially.

So yes, lots of AI, but this is not a "vibe-coded" slop project either. I have decades of experience in programming (native) and so I'm quite confident that this will work out well - but I totally see your skepticism.

lietuvis• 2 months ago

Why do you think ai is better at finding bugs?

fooker7• 2 months ago

Why go through LLVM at all?

There are a bunch of tools that JIT somewhat optimized assembly.

silverwind• 2 months ago

Yeah, a missed opportunity. But I'm sure such a compiler will eventually arise.

jeswin9• 2 months ago

First of all, congrats.

The website doesn't explain how it works in a lot of detail. I am the author of tsonic [1], a TS compiler that produces binaries via Clr NativeAOT (on Linux/Mac). The hardest parts were numbers (TS has no ints or shorts), Generics, and TS Utility Types. I've been on it for the last 6 months (almost every day); getting to near complete TS compatibility is a very long journey because of its expressiveness.

Add: A request is to explain how it works on the website. I did take a look at https://www.perryts.com/en/internals/ but are those techniques described really sufficient to express TS? Based on my experience, I must say I'm surprised. But the proof is in the pudding, and if it's compiling those examples it must be working somehow!

[1] https://tsonic.org

thayne• 2 months ago

The hardest parts were numbers (TS has no ints or shorts)

The easy way to handle that would be to just treat "number" as 64-bit float, since that is semantically how Javascript defines them. But that can hurt performance.

Another option is to define your own integer types

jeswin9• 2 months ago

Another option is to define your own integer types

This is what I did. Most int usage is inferred, but if they had to define it explicitly, I make them import { int } from "@tsonic/core/types.js";

Reubend2• 2 months ago

Hey there, I'm going to check out your project because the comments here have me a little worried that OP's project might have some quality issues.

Two things I found a little confusing from the docs though:

I couldn't easily find a page describing what it can't do yet. I saw that it only works with a "strict, deterministic subset of TypeScript", but is there a page showing what's included and not included in that subset?

Also, what's an "ambient surface" in this context? Is that a compiler term I'm just not familiar with?

jeswin9• 2 months ago

strict, deterministic subset of TypeScript

I'll add that page, thanks. Today, almost all of idiomatic TS is supported including most of its utility classes. Dynamic JS-style code is not supported, for example adding a function or a field into an object, prototype-based class modifications etc. I'll compile a list, and include it along with the large docs cleanup planned before v1.

Also, what's an "ambient surface" in this context?

The idea is that when JS gets transpiled into C# (or Rust, upcoming), JS globals and built-ins are invalid. The native "surface" is C#, meaning the string is .Net's string type and the methods that you expect on JS strings would be missing. But when you opt in to a surface, such as the "JS surface", the compiler applies surface defined translations such as substring becoming SubString, either directly or via a companion helper class. This allows you to write against standard JS and Node APIs, instead of relying on the stdlib/builtins of the target framework (currently CLR). And you get the JS "stdlib" - console, JSON, Date, Map, Set etc.

For example, all the projects you see under this use the JS surface: https://github.com/tsoniclang/proof-is-in-the-pudding/tree/m...

Nathanba2• 2 months ago

Does tsonic have debugging support of any kind and how fast is the compiler?

amlug7• 2 months ago

Hi jeswin,

thanks for your comment. I'm Ralph, the founder of Perry (though at this point we are quite a few core contributors + maintainers).

You are right to be skeptical and yes, numbers are the hardest. In fact we started adding some native numbers to make things easier (i64, i32 etc.), types that are not natively available in Javascript/Typescript but make it much easier for the compiler. And they'll internally work as numbers for any other runtime.

The docs I must admit are not quite up to date. We have been pushing hard for Nodejs parity the last few dayys/weeks and are making great progress, however the docs and the site have not been updated in the same time just yet, so apologies for that.

Also, just as a fun fact: I noticed a spike in traffic and found this threat, so happy to take any requests but I'm not the OG of this threat haha.

ventana4• 2 months ago

I understand that implementing the TypeScript compiler is not the same thing as implementing all Node.js APIs, but still, advertising "no runtime" and then requiring JS runtime (and a full local Rust setup to compile it) for something as basic as an Express web server makes the "no runtime" claim look like a slight exaggeration. I'm not saying that it's bad, it's just that the website is too optimistic.

Edit: as discussed in the thread below, the most likely reason for that is that Express is pure JS with types from @types/express, so the TypeScript compiler bails on it. Reasonable, but still frustrating.

Overall, it seems like every time I decide to try a vibe coded compiler I get this feeling like when you see a plate with fruits on a table but, coming closer, see that they are fake plastic fruits. No, I cannot use it to build a native binary of my project without V8 as easy as shown on the front page. Maybe some other project, yes, but not a real one.

Unrelated: if a project is called Perry, should the icon be a platypus in a hat, you know?

nl2• 2 months ago

This seems either wrong or very uncharitable.

Perry exposes a faithful subset of Node.js’s stdlib HTTP server modules on top of hyper + rustls + tokio-tungstenite. The whole shape — handler signature, IncomingMessage / ServerResponse properties + methods, TLS opts, ALPN-negotiated HTTP/2, WebSocket upgrade dispatch — works unmodified, so unmodified Node servers (Express / Koa / Polka / hono via @hono/node-server / etc.) compile and run natively[1]

It's pretty standard for "no runtime" to mean nothing on the device you install the compiled target app.

I think iOS development still needs Ruby for Pod installation but no one says Swift apps need a Ruby runtime for example.

[1] https://docs.perryts.com/stdlib/http.html

ventana4• 2 months ago

Well, I did indeed spend some time playing with it before writing my comment. I first tried to compile the TypeScript project I'm working on, and it happens to be an Express server. After some minor unrelated fixes required (Perry does not understand importing "fs/promises", so I fixed it to import "fs" and then taking .promises) it said it needs JS runtime, and the smallest repro I found was

  $ cat index.ts
  import * as express from 'express';
  const app = express();

which gives

  $ perry index.ts
  Collecting modules...
    JS module: express -> /private/tmp/ex/node_modules/express/index.js
  Error: build pulled in `perry-jsruntime` (QuickJS-based eval-equivalent runtime)   via the following file(s):
    - /private/tmp/ex/node_modules/express/index.js [express]
  
  `perry-jsruntime` is treated as a privileged dependency on par with adding a JIT to the binary — it re-introduces arbitrary runtime code execution and defeats Perry's structural advantage over Node. Refusing to link by default. (#499)
  
  To enable, set `perry.allowJsRuntime: true` in the host package.json, or pass `--enable-js-runtime` on the CLI for a one-off build. (Falls under `--lockdown` deny set when that flag ships — see #496.)

Maybe it's because Express is written in JavaScript with external types from @types/express, that would explain why it might need JS runtime, but it does not make things easier for me.

pjmlp5• 2 months ago

It's pretty standard for "no runtime" to mean nothing on the device you install the compiled target app.

Only by layman that don't understand compilers.

ozgrakkurt• 2 months ago

It is not standard for “no runtime” to mean that. For example go has a runtime that is compiled into the binary or you can google c runtime and see a million ways the word “runtime” is used with c.

mohsen12• 2 months ago

I am taking this attitude to an extreme with tsz. I don't want to announce to the world that tsz is ready until I tested it really really well.

Currently tsz passes nearly 100% of TypeScript tests but that is not enough. I want it to be able to type check complex things like type-challenges solutions or complex utility type packages. I'm stress testing it with a repo with 1.5 million lines of code.

I'm constantly assigning AI agents tasks to find bugs in tsz and open issues.

I'll say this is "alpha" when it can do all those things plus matching tsc exactly in thousands of open source projects where tsc reported type errors. It's easy to find CI runs that tsc reported errors. I'll build a database of all the cases I've verified tsz with and will publish those. Hoping that can give folks confidence that tsz is robust

For now, tsz is just a work in progress.

https://tsz.dev

tomcam• 2 months ago

This looks exciting.

nurettin• 2 months ago

To be fair, nowhere on the frontpage does it say it can build libraries that depend on node. It seems like you are just waiting in the bushes to dis AI assisted coding.

amlug7• 2 months ago

Hey ventana,

(I'm the founder of Perry) thanks for giving it a try and let me be upfront with you: Compiling express has been one of the hardest challenges for Perry. I'm 99% sure it still does not work out of the box just yet - which is why we pivoted to fastify more than express.

That said, the last few days we made great progress to get Perry to compile packages "lik" Express (lot's of dynamic imports) much better.

I'll retry this once our current batch of Nodejs parity issues are resolved.

Just to be clear though: No v8 runtime, we actually took out the v8 engine we had optionally included thus far because the benefits no longer outweight the disadvantages.

If you want to tag along the progres follow me on X (@proggeramlug), that's where I share the most up to date progress on Perry.

Also, it is definetely a goal to compile apps that use Express and that will happen - not commiting to a timeline but just in the last few days we got so much closer.

ventana4• 2 months ago

Thanks for following up!

Don't get me wrong, I'll be totally excited to replace my card game app backend with a static binary, that's why I immediately went on trying Perry :)

Just to give you an idea what I'm trying to achieve: I'm currently hosting it on a single VPS. Node is handling the average of 30 qps, peaking up to 100 qps, just fine, with P99 latency being safely below 100ms and only occasional spikes of P99 to up to a second. The spikes are probably caused by some VPS sluggishness as I just use filesystem to periodically dump the in-memory games state.

But I expect I might eventually start seeing performance issues, so rewriting to a language that compiles to a native binary is on the table. I was considering Golang or Rust; making the current codebase compile to a binary would be a miracle saving me quite some time, even if I just vibe-code the rewrite :)

jeswin9• 2 months ago

Traditional OOP runtimes use vtables for method resolution, adding a layer of indirection on every call. Perry resolves all method calls statically during compilation, turning interface method calls into direct jumps.

What? How is this possible, even with something as simple as:

  interface Animal {
    speak(): string;
  }
  
  class Cat implements Animal {}  
  class Dog implements Animal {}

  function makeSound(animal: Animal) {
    return animal.speak();
  }

avaer2• 2 months ago

It's not possible, it reduces to the halting problem, unless you start restricting the Javascript/Typescript you allow.

Otherwise the best you can do is be solid on common special cases. Which is what a modern (non-static) JS/TS runtime is.

fooker7• 2 months ago

You can just generate the 'vtable' as code :)

  switch (animal.type)
    case Cat: return cat_speak()
    case Dog: return dog_speak()

The generated code has the functions resolved in compile time, there's no function pointer lookup in a table happening. I don't know if this is how this project does it, but this is the commonly used technique when you want to do this.

jeswin9• 2 months ago

Hmm yeah good point. I didn't think of it. It might even be cheaper to do this when the list of possible types are closed and few.

I am still inclined to believe AI just made up the documentation though, because this has its own tradeoffs.

ventana4• 2 months ago

I only grepped "vtable" in the repository so this might be not the relevant piece of code, but from the comment in [1] it seems they fallback to building a vtable if the static resolution is impossible.

[1] https://github.com/PerryTS/perry/blob/39d5ba2e9db5adf7f7fc90...

satvikpendem3• 2 months ago

A very interesting project because I always thought TypeScript or at least some subset of it should be natively compiled.

It looks like others had a similar idea too, adding a "sound mode" to TypeScript, such as this project which is converting tsgo to Rust, also with LLMs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48189156#48189573

https://tsz.dev/

jeswin9• 2 months ago

such as this project which is converting tsgo to Rust

If you'd like to follow, here's my attempt at converting tsgo to typescript (called tsts [1]). Admittedly there's AI involved, but it's a very mechanical job. Going from golang to ts is not a very difficult problem, the other way around would have been way harder. The plan is to then compile tsts to binary via tsonic.

[1] https://github.com/tsoniclang/tsts

satvikpendem3• 2 months ago

Interesting, seems to be a very roundabout way of doing it. Have you tried compiling the current TypeScript implementation which is still in TypeScript, as tsgo is for TS 7? If so, what were the results?

IshKebab2• 2 months ago

Uhm... You're trying to port Typescript's Typescript-to-Go port back to Typescript? Am I missing something?

pjmlp5• 2 months ago

It already exists for years, it is part of Microsoft's MakeCode efforts for kids.

https://makecode.com/language

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/static-...

Much saner than a vibe coded compiler.

mohsen12• 2 months ago

Just a clarification that tsz is not a port of tsgo or tsc. It's an entirely different architecture. Inspired by Chalk and Salsa it does all of the type computations to a solver crate that does not know about the AST. This allows me to do very fast type equity and assignability computations without carrying the weight of AST nodes while walking the type graph etc.

It's already showing results that is nearly 3x faster than tsgo. For multi-file large projects I have some ideas to implement to make it faster there too.

Once tsz is fast and stable I'll shift focus on making sound mode a reality.

rzmmm2• 2 months ago

FYI many of the tsz sound mode features are available as linter plugins for typescript. They leverage type information

hypendev• 2 months ago

Perry definitely looks interesting, was just looking at getting one of these to include into my framework.

Would love to see more about it, or see more about the actual compiler docs.

While the UI framework part is neat, I prefer not to force everything into TS. Combining it means UI definitions and semantics get mixed into AST, making the unbundling of them a humongous task in itself.

Exactly the reason I built my own with pretty similar native UI semantics which supports Rust, Go, Kotlin and more (https://hypen.space) - would love to integrate Perry with it to compile TS apps directly into the runtime - but while the idea itself is great, looking at the documentation makes it hard to implement, and a lot of parts seem confusing.

Can I just use the compiler without the rest of the framework? What is the architecture? What are the limits?

After digging through the documentation, I'm unfortunately just more confused honestly. There are dozens of packages and slop markdown files such as `BUG_STRING_COMPARISON.md` and or `PERRY_UI_IMPLEMENTATION.md` which is an instruction file left for the LLM that just makes me trust the project less.

So while the idea is cool and the performance seems cool, the AI slop presentation would definitely need improvement. Adding a human touch would make it much, much better, as one could actually understand what they are dealing with.

Reubend2• 2 months ago

0 ms Startup time

Is that true? It just goes right into the code with no initialization of any other libraries needed?

curtisblaine• 2 months ago

I'm confused by the (frankly bad) documentation. It says that for pure js dependencies we need to use the v8 flag to bring in the runtime (which is undesirable), but what is the practical difference between a js file and the same file with .ts extension and explicit *any* type in every signature? Does this mean that we have to be very careful how we write our typescript to avoid v8 (and if yes, how? I couldn't find that on the site) or does it mean that we can get away with transpiling everything to ts with loose typing? I suspect it's the first, in which case it's literally the most important information that anyone using Perry needs to know, and it should be one of the first things mentioned in their AI-vibed page.

alex7o• 2 months ago

It would be super cool, if we can get this to compile the typescript compiler and see how fast it is against the go version.

P.S: does it have PGO for collapsing numbers to ints when possible etc

mittermayr• 2 months ago

Browsing through the repo, I noticed this, and wondered if that isn't a recipe for disaster (code is condensed to showcase my concern)?

  app.get('/api/auth/callback', async (request: any, reply: any) => {
    const params: any = request.query || {};
    const code = params.code || '';
    const state = params.state || '';
    // Exchange code for token via curl
    const tokenResult = curlExec(
      'curl -s -X POST "https://github.com/login/oauth/access_token" -H "Accept: application/json" -d "client_id=' + GITHUB_CLIENT_ID + '&client_secret=' + GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET + '&code=' + code + '"'
    );

Shell injection?

chenzhekl• 2 months ago

Why is this on the front page of Hacker News? Isn't it just more vibe-coded garbage where nobody takes responsibility for the resulting code?

tacone• 2 months ago

Just spent an hour trying to make it work (including re-compiling) with the jsruntime.

`Error: JavaScript modules found but libperry_jsruntime.a not found. Build it with: cargo build --release -p perry-jsruntime`

Turns out jsruntime was removed one week ago, but the error messages probably not have been updated as they should.

https://github.com/PerryTS/perry/commit/848339fa4ee4b00a53f5...

lenkite• 2 months ago

Why are all vibe-coded web-site cards so stupidly identical ? I have seen dozens of these and whenever they use cards, there is an icon taking valuable space by itself followed by a header. That is ridiculous design and any designer/CSS developer would point that out. So why do LLMs emit this ?

Alifatisk2• 2 months ago

Seems like many in the comments is confused and unsure how this project actually managed to accomplish all the claims the website. To me, after realizing its ai slop, I lost interest. I feel like we are seeing more and more of this scenario in here. Should we perhaps start adding a tag in the title to mention that its LLM assisted work?

Perry Compiles TypeScript directly to executables using SWC and LLVM

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