LLM-built Rust port of the TypeScript compiler beats Microsoft's Go version on speed
Developer pingdotgg has ported Microsoft's native TypeScript compiler (written in Go) to Rust as ts-rust (npm package tsc-rs). The early 0.1.0 release claims 100% compatibility on every real-world project tested, all 181,711 ported Go tests passing, and geometric-mean type-check times about 1.61× faster than tsc 7 across six open-source apps. The author says more than $400,000 of OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT-6 Astra tokens never exceeded ~84% compatibility, while Claude Opus 5.5 rewrote the port from scratch and produced a working v0 in 10 hours for roughly $24,047 of API spend over two weeks.
If the numbers hold up, it is a striking example of LLM-driven large-scale code migration — though the author says he has never read the generated code and the project is an early release.
ts-rust (aka tsc-rs)
I wanted to see if LLMs could port the TypeScript compiler, checker and lsp to Rust. Turns out they can.
It cost over $420,000 in tokens to do it, but you could probably have done it for ~$20k (see below)
Motivations
- Test model capabilities
- Make a fast TypeScript type checker
- Make a ts checker that can work in WASM with high performance
- Memes
Warnings
This is an early release. It has 100% compatibility in every real world project we have tested. It should work as a drop in replacement for the vast majority of apps. See Known problems.
#ts-rust#tsc-rs#TypeScript#Microsoft#OpenAI#GPT-5.6 Sol#GPT-6 Astra#Anthropic#Claude Opus 5.5#Claude Code#Effect#Bun