scriptc

scriptc compiles TypeScript straight to a native binary, with no Node or V8 along for the ride. It runs your source through the real tsc type checker, lowers it to a typed intermediate representation, emits C, and lets clang produce a small native executable, around 200KB, that starts cold with none of a JS engine's overhead. It's a genuine Vercel Labs project, confirmed by its Hacker News debut and press coverage, not a name-squat.

The numbers are the hook: in Vercel's own demo, startup drops from roughly 47ms on Node to about 2.4ms, in a static binary a fraction of the size. For CLIs and small tools, that's a meaningful difference.

Free under Apache 2.0, install it from npm, bring clang.

The catch is that it's very early, v0.0.x with no stable release. macOS arm64 is the primary target, with Linux and Windows via cross-compile, and realistically only a subset of TypeScript compiles today. It competes with Bun and Deno's compile commands, Node's single executable apps, and honestly with just reaching for Go or Rust on a small CLI. Fascinating and worth watching, but this is an experiment to play with, not a build step to depend on yet.