Comment

Comment by nathanrf

I'm not involved in this rewrite, but I made some minor contributions a few years ago.

TSC doesn't use many union types, it's mostly OOP-ish down-casting or chains of if-statements.

One reason for this is I think performance; most objects are tagged by bitsets in order to pack more info about the object without needing additional allocations. But TypeScript can't really (ergonomically) represent this in the type system, so that means you don't get any real useful unions.

A lot of the objects are also secretly mutable (for caching/performance) which can make precise union types not very useful, since they can be easily invalidated by those mutations.

parent nathanrf 1 year ago

No comments yet

Be the first to share your thoughts.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton