Curious why Microsoft did not use Rust to rewrite the TypeScript Compiler?(slavaolenin.medium.com)
slavaolenin.medium.com
Curious why Microsoft did not use Rust to rewrite the TypeScript Compiler?
https://slavaolenin.medium.com/curious-why-microsoft-did-not-use-rust-to-rewrite-the-typescript-compiler-16f1611bfd1d
Anders: When you have a product that has been in use for more than a decade, with millions of programmers and, God knows how many millions of lines of code out there, you are going to be faced with the longest tail of incompatibilities you could imagine. So, from the get-go, we knew that the only way this was going to be meaningful was if we ported the existing code base. The existing code base makes certain assumptions -- specifically, it assumes that there is automatic garbage collection -- and that pretty much limited our choices. That heavily ruled out Rust. I mean, in Rust you have memory management, but it's not automatic; you can get reference counting or whatever you could, but then, in addition to that, there's the borrow checker and the rather stringent constraints it puts on you around ownership of data structures. In particular, it effectively outlaws cyclic data structures, and all of our data structures are heavily cyclic.