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As we all know, Deno right now is written in Rust with several libraries like Tokio. But could the day ever come where Deno is self-hosting, as in the Deno source code is written in TypeScript and is turned into an executable using e.g. deno compile?
Deno's goal is to be a complete toolchain. If it does become self-hosting, then it joins C/C++ and Rust as one of the few toolchains powerful enough to not need to depend on anything except itself.
Advantages:
Completes the Circle of Life: Becoming self-hosting or self-compiling is a big milestone for any language or project. It proves just how strong and mature your technology is. People started taking Rust and LLVM much more seriously once they were feature-complete enough to be used for building themselves.
Security: Rust is safer, but it's not invincible. Unsafe code is still possible. If Deno ever becomes self-hosting enough to compile itself and all dependencies are written in TypeScript, then all code will be written in a language that doesn't allow low-level access to unsafe things like memory in the first place.
Package management at its finest: Decentralized ES Modules for every dependency. No one single source or website to rely on for its building blocks.
Disadvantages:
Performance: Deno right now has Rust and Tokio to provide as much performance as it needs. NectarJS proved that JavaScript can be compiled to native code without GC, but getting things like TCP working on at or near the same level as Rust would likely require quite a bit of time and effort.
Cost of Refactoring: Deno only became stable in May 2020. Adding new features is what the core team is focused on right now. Refactoring the codebase into TypeScript may not be something welcomed by the developers.
Does anyone have any thoughts? Are there any pros/cons I'm not thinking of? What does the Deno team think?
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As we all know, Deno right now is written in Rust with several libraries like Tokio. But could the day ever come where Deno is self-hosting, as in the Deno source code is written in TypeScript and is turned into an executable using e.g.
deno compile
?Deno's goal is to be a complete toolchain. If it does become self-hosting, then it joins C/C++ and Rust as one of the few toolchains powerful enough to not need to depend on anything except itself.
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Does anyone have any thoughts? Are there any pros/cons I'm not thinking of? What does the Deno team think?
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