Amen. I was unreasonably opposed to TypeScript at first after lots of bad experiences with messy JavaScript when I was first learning development - but after immersing myself in it for a year or so at $NEW_JOB, I absolutely love it. The only ways in which I can see that Go outperforms TypeScript is in performance, but frankly I don't care and most developers shouldn't - unless you're writing truly low-level high-performance utilities, you should (within reason) bias for being able to write (and iterate) fast over being able to execute fast. You can always re-write in Rust if you find that performance is a bottleneck.
I have been using typescript as my primary language for years and since I am used to it I actually enjoy it (much more than I enjoyed Java or Python in the past). And depending on what you built I agree, especially for one off scripts or if you plan on hosting just one or two things somewhere. On the other hand I recently saw a video by webdev Cody that got me thinking, where he was comparing a dead simple api server in go and in bun hosted on railway and their memory usage was different by an order of magnitude in favour of go plus you can compile your program down to a few megabytes instead of bundling a ~100megabyte runtime. So if you have a couple dozen of side projects where you host servers/apis that difference can end up in a noticeable operating cost differential. He made a few other points such as throughput, the more complete standard library and tooling such as go fmt and that writing the equivalent server in go wasn’t really all that different from the typescript code.
You’re right that rewriting is always an option but for all over the place folks like me the next 3 projects are half done before I even think about optimising my hosting bill. But as I said, strongly depends on what you build.
I guess there are no winners, just tradeoffs.
I wonder if one use case for llms in the future could be feeding a sizeable typescript/python codebase into it and then have it spit out an equivalent in idiomatic rust/zig/c. I am aware that transpilers and assembly script and static Hermes exist but what I mean is more of a result that produces a maintainable rewritten version making use of the idiomatic libraries and coding conventions of the target language.
Good points, thank you! I'm lucky enough that I don't really need to worry about operating cost because I self-host the few things I have built and am nowhere near maxing out my hardware, but your point is well made.
Although...
> writing the equivalent server in go wasn’t really all that different from the typescript code
I think _that's_ true - one strength I'll absolutely concede to Go is that spinning up a basic server is very concise with the stdlib. The problem is that implementing its _logic_ is then super-verbose.
