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It's kind of funny but also depressing watching all the frontend people try to force Javascript onto the backend. They've been slowly rewriting their tooling using more suitable languages:

- esbuild (Go) is 100x faster than webpack and friends

- Bun (Zig) and Deno (Rust) are ~2x faster than Node

- Typescript recently announced a rewrite in Go for an expected 10x performance gain

Maybe one day they'll realize that those languages are good for more than developer tooling? Maybe they can even be used for serving web content?


Couple things:

First, perf you mention is from fundamentally CPU intensive workloads, not a sparse async environment like a typical server.

Second (far more important) the reason we do this is type safety. We don't want types to break at the handover or to maintain them twice. We eliminate a huge category of issues and mental overhead.

This maintainability and simplicity is worth more (to me at least) than perf.

As a bonus there's also directly shared utils, classes etc. which again can be reused across client/server but more importantly stay in sync.


I am curious, how do you handle version skew between frontend / backend when you're reusing code + types?


I design solutions so that there is a distinct frontend and backend. Instead of reuse, common code gets shared. Yes, it does take a bit of fiddling to get the architecture to support that. But once you get it bedded down, it becomes just a matter of conventions.


More depressing is those of us that would rather use Java, C#, basically any JVM or .NET language, or even if it must really be, Go, but have to bother dealing with nodejs instead, because reasons.


> Typescript recently announced a rewrite in Go for an expected 10x performance gain

Really?

Why use Typescript at all, in that case?

I really do not know


The improvement is in `tsc`, the type checker. The improvement is reduced build times and thus faster developer or agent cycle times.


The Typescript compiler, currently JavaScript, is being rewritten in Go. The 10x performance gain is in build time, which is still a major speedup and will shrink the development loop.


I hate Go as much as anyone, but it has incredible cross platform support.

There's built in cross compilation for building a static binary across window/mac/linux.

It's the number 1 feature in Go, lol.


So does C#, python, node and a variety of other languages.


This comment implies you've not used Go. It really isn't equivalent to the NPM and dependency hell that's node. Or picking the number of workers in Gunicorn. Or.. C#?


No, I was referring to error handling, not package management solutions.

Stop strawmanning.


Reread the first comment you responded to. It was talking about cross compilation not error handling


There's no real comparison between Python/Node and Golang's cross-compilation.


Based on his interview with Joe Rogan, he has absolutely no imagination about what it means if humans actually manage to build general AI. Rogan basically ends up introducting him to some basic ideas about transhumanism.

To me, he is a finance bro grifter who lucked into his current position. Without Ilya he would still be peddling WorldCoin.


> who lucked into his current position

Which can be said for most of the survivorship-biased "greats" we talk about. Right time, right place.

(Although to be fair — and we can think of the Two Steves, or Bill and Paul — there are often a number of people at the right time and right place — so somehow the few we still talk about knew to take advantage of that right time and right place.)


it's weird how nobodies will always tell themselves succesful people got there by sheer blind luck

yet they can never seem to explain why those succesful people all seem to have similar traits in terms of work ethic and intelligence

you'd think there would be a bunch of lazy slackers making it big in tech but alas


I think you might have it backward. Luck here implies starting with exactly the same work ethic and abilities as millions of other people that all hope to one day see their numbers come up in the lottery of limited opportunities. It's not to say that successful people start off as lazy slackers as you say, but if you were to observe one such lazy slacker who's made a half-assed effort at building something that even just accidentally turned out to be a success, you might see that rare modicum of validation fuel them enough that the motivation transforms them into a workhorse. Often time, when the biography is written, lines are slightly redrawn to project the post-success persona back a few years pre-success. A completely different recounting of history thus ensues. Usually one where there was blood, sweat, and fire involved to get to that first ticket.


so you've moved the goalposts even further now and speculate that succesful people started out as slackers, got lucky, and that luck made them work harder

as an Asian, it amazes me how far Americans and Europeans will go to avoid a hard days work


Coming up next: dumb and dumber schools Noam Chomsky on modern philosophy...



There's weirdly many people who touch on the work around transhumanism but never heard the word before. There's a video of geohot basically talking about that idea, then someone from the audience mentions the name... and geohotz is confused. I'm honestly surprised.


The transhumanists tended to be philosopher types, the name coming from this kind of idea of humanism:

>Humanism is a philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential, and agency of human beings, whom it considers the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry. (wikipedia)

Whereas the other lot are often engineers / compsci / business people building stuff.


yeah because you're a hacker news poster lol

same audience who think Jobs is a grifter and Woz is the true reason for Apple's success


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