compilets

Compilets

TypeScript to C++ compiler.

Giving a TypeScript project, it can translate the code to C++, and produce native executables and Node.js modules.

This project does not plan to support every TypeScript feature - doing so would make it downgrade to a JavaScript interpreter - it only translates code that can be effiently represented in C++. Code relying on JavaScript's dynamic natures, for example prototype and any, will be rejected.

Currently it is still very early days, and it fails to translate most existing TypeScript projects, but it is capable of turning some performance-critical code into native Node.js modules.

Docs

• A design of translating TypeScript to C++
• Roadmap
• Creating native Node.js modules

There is currently no documentation on which TypeScript syntax and features are supported.

CLI

Install:

npm install -g compilets

Help:

━━━ Compilets - 0.0.1-dev ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

  $ compilets <command>

━━━ General commands ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

  compilets build [--config #0] [--target #0] ...
    Build C++ project.

  compilets gen [--root #0] [--config #0] [--target #0]
    Generate a C++ project from TypeScript project.

  compilets gn-gen [--config #0] <--target #0>
    Run "gn gen" for the C++ project.

Example:

mkdir example
cd example
echo 'console.log("Hello World!")' > main.ts
compilets gen
compilets build
./cpp-project/out/Debug/example

Compatibility with tsconfig.json and package.json

When compiling a project, the tsconfig.json file under the root directory is used for initializing the TypeScript compiler. If such file is not present, following compilerOptions will be used:

{
  noEmit: true,
  noImplicitAny: true,
  strictNullChecks: true,
  allowImportingTsExtensions: true
}

In this case the .ts files under the root directory will be used for compilation, and the files are searched non-recursively.

Also, the compilerOptions.strictNullChecks field must be true when a tsconfig.json file is provided.

When a package.json file is found in the root directory, following rules are applied:

• The name field is used as the project's name.
• If the compilets.main field is a .ts file, a native module will be created.
• If the compilets.bin field is an object with values of .ts files, executables will be created for each entry of the object.

An example package.json file:

{
  "name": "download",
  "compilets": {
    "main": "lib.ts",
    "bin": {
      "download": "cli.ts"
    }
  }
}

If there is no package.json file, the root directory must contain only one .ts file and it will be compiled into executable.

Developement

The documentations of Oilpan GC (cppgc) can be found at:

• High-performance garbage collection for C++
• Oilpan: C++ Garbage Collection
• Oilpan API reference

You can get familiar with TypeScript's compiler APIs with following articles:

• Gentle Introduction To TypeScript Compiler API
• TypeScript Transformer Handbook
• Using the Compiler API

Tools below will help developement of this project:

• TypeScript AST Viewer
• TypeScript API Reference

About GN, the build system used for building C++ code:

• GN Homepage
• GN Reference
• Standalone GN

License

This project is published under GPLv3, the C++ code (/cpp/runtime) has a an extra linking exception.

In plain words, distributing the compiled executable files does not require you to open source, only including the source code of this project requires so.

I'll change the license to a permissive one if this project gets enough funding.

Contributor license agreement

By sending a pull request, you hereby grant to owners and users of this project a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute your contributions and such derivative works.

The owners of the this project will also be granted the right to relicense the contributed source code and its derivative works to a more permissive license.