Microsoft · Claude · Google · GPT · Rust · Anthropic · The Register
$24,000 AI experiment ports TypeScript compiler to Rust
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Microsoft's Go rewrite gets some competition, with a developer claiming his port runs twice as fast.
Key facts
- He burned more than $400,000 worth of API-equivalent tokens using OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT-6 Astra, which reached roughly 84 percent compatibility before the models struggled to complete
- To his surprise, the new model produced a working implementation, consuming about $24,000 worth of API-equivalent tokens through Browne's Claude subscriptions
- That project cost the 'softies about $120,000 in AI coins
- When Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 last month, he revisited the idea
Summary
With some extra tokens to burn, developer and popular YouTuber Theo Browne used AI agents to port Microsoft's TypeScript compiler to Rust, to see if it could be done. Browne claims his Rust port runs twice as fast as Microsoft's official Go-based TypeScript rewrite (v7) released earlier this year and 12.5 times as fast as the previous version of TypeScript (v6), not bad work considering he says he hasn’t even inspected the code. TS_Rust is a project that would have been impractical even earlier this year, Browne noted in a video presentation. The resulting Rust-based TypeScript also opens the possibility of using Google’s V8 engine as a less-memory-intensive alternative for running agentic workloads written in TypeScript, an approach that would be unfeasible using Microsoft’s Go implementation of TypeScript, Browne argued.