// the find
evanw/thinscript
A low-level programming language inspired by TypeScript
ThinScript is a 2016 experiment in writing a TypeScript-like language that compiles to JavaScript, WebAssembly, and C. The compiler is bootstrapped — written in itself — which is the interesting technical achievement here. It's for language implementation enthusiasts, not for anyone wanting to ship code.
The bootstrapped compiler is genuinely impressive for a solo experiment: the compiler compiles itself and outputs valid C, JS, and WASM from the same source. Targeting three backends from one frontend is architecturally clean. The conditional compilation (#if JS / #elif WASM) is a practical feature that most toy languages skip. And the fact that compiled output is checked into the repo means you can actually run it without a build chain.
No garbage collection, and the README says so plainly — you allocate but never free, which makes it useless for any real program. The WebAssembly binary format targeted here is pre-1.0 spec and has been invalid for nearly a decade. Last commit was May 2016, so none of this has been touched since WebAssembly shipped. There are 49 forks and zero apparent successors, so this is a dead end, not a foundation.