That JavaScript/TypeScript runtime idea I mentioned has mutated a bit.

Once I actually thought about it, writing another Node.js/Deno/Bun-shaped runtime didn't seem especially useful; there are enough of those already. What I actually want to try is an ahead-of-time JavaScript/TypeScript compiler in roughly the SBCL/Chez Scheme tradition: native code, with a generic implementation always available and specialized versions picked by cheap runtime guards. A failed guard just falls through to code that's already compiled, rather than needing an interpreter or a deopt path. There are probably adjacent projects doing pieces of this, so I won't claim the territory is empty, but I haven't seen this exact shape applied to JavaScript/TypeScript. I've codenamed it Oseo (鼯鼠; flying squirrel in Sino-Korean).

It's still just a compiler experiment, not something I'd call presentable yet, so the repo stays closed for now. Once it works well enough, the first thing I want to try is switching the Fedify CLI, currently built with deno compile, over to Oseo and seeing what breaks. Fedify is the ActivityPub server framework I also maintain, so it should make a reasonably unforgiving first customer. I'll keep picking at Oseo for the next few months and post again when something interesting starts working.

갑자기 Common Lisp의 SBCL이나 Scheme의 Chez Scheme 같은 스타일의 JavaScript/TypeScript AOT 컴파일러를 만들어 보고 싶어져서, 일단 프로토타이핑을 해보고 있다. 코드네임은 날다람쥐를 뜻하는 한자어 오서(鼯鼠)^[1]에서 따와 Oseo로 지었다. 아마 코드네임 그대로 계속 갈 것 같긴 하지만…

아마 하루아침에 끝나진 못할 것 같고, 몇 개월 끈기 있게 붙잡고 있다 보면 뭐라도 나오지 않을까 싶다.

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1. 【鼯鼠】의 「鼯」자는 오직 날다람쥐만을 가리키기 위한 낱자이다. ↩︎