Show HN: The Tsonic Programming Language

You can see some examples here: https://github.com/tsoniclang/proof-is-in-the-pudding

And a hugo clone (which compiles to native code) here: https://github.com/tsoniclang/tsumo

Linux and macOS for now.

tsonic.org

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61 points

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jeswin

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3 days ago

12 comments

throwawaygod ・ 2 days ago

Whats the debugger story like? Do we have to use Microsoft's proprietary dotnet debugger?

  • jeswin ・ 2 days ago

    At the moment, we have to use Microsoft's debugger on the generated code. I have it as a todo - but I don't think I'll get to it soon.

mkl ・ 2 days ago

The webpage is broken on mobile, as the lines go off the screen (Firefox Android).

  • jeswin ・ 2 days ago

    Thanks.

    I've just improved it, but still more to do. Will look at it this week.

throwawaygod ・ 2 days ago

Another typescript compiler similar to this: SharpTS[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46557698]

  • jeswin ・ 2 days ago

    Wow, I never came across it - thank you.

    There are key differences though. What tsonic offers: (0) broad data type support, stack allocated types etc (1) nodejs and js compatibility libs, (2) the availability (in tsonic) of the entire .Net BCL, Asp.Net and EF Core as d.ts files (for example, in @tsonic/dotnet) so that tsc would still run, (3) bindings generator (tsbindgen) for any .net dll etc.

    What tsonic is missing: (1) interpreter, (2) compile to .Net IL. Tsonic will only do native code; and does so by converting ts to c# and then using the NativeAOT chain on generated C#. SharpTS is compiling straight to IL (I think), something I considered but decided not to for the time being.

    I think these are two different approaches. With pros and cons for both.

zahlman ・ 2 days ago

> Tsonic is a TypeScript to C# compiler

So, not a separate language.

  • jeswin ・ 2 days ago

    Well, there are some additions - thought it can be compiled via tsc into js that would never run. This is still useful though for IDE and tooling support, language servers etc.

    The most important thing is that you have these types you can import. For example the "int" below:

      import { int } from "@tsonic/core/types.js";
  
  function fibonacci(n: int): int {
  
    if (n <= 1) {
      return n;
    }
  
    return fibonacci(n - 1) + fibonacci(n - 2);
  }
    Instead of making it a keyword, I decided to export these from core/types.ts - so that the code can still be compiled with tsc, and all the tooling would still work. Similarly (among others), you'd use ptr<long>, if you wanted a pointer to a long.