Vercel Labs Releases scriptc, a TypeScript-to-Native Compiler That Ships 170KB Binaries With No JavaScript Engine Inside
Vercel Labs (surfaced via Hacker News, 271 points / 151 comments)·medium signal
scriptc compiles TypeScript through an IR to C or LLVM and out to native executables containing no Node, no V8, and no JS engine at all. It handles classes, closures, generics, async/await, exceptions, and a real standard library (strings, arrays, Map, Set, JSON, Math, typed arrays, Buffer) plus Node APIs including fs, path, process, child_process, crypto, net, http, https, tls and fetch. Static binaries land at 170–200KB and start in ~2.4ms against Node's ~47ms, using 1–4MB of memory versus Node's 67–116MB; a `--dynamic` mode embeds quickjs-ng (~620KB) for constructs the static tier rejects, pushing binaries to ~3MB. Apache-2.0, 286 commits, 271 points on Hacker News.