Me too. Honestly I still live off crypto but after 6 years of being a blockchain dev I refuse to work in the industry anymore.
There are a lot of selling points around freedom, but in practice its just gambling and its impossible to build real products in the space.
In-fact there is no demand for anything other than gambling.
Is your code easy to transfer to other environments?
The Apple vendor lock-in is not a great place for development if the end product runs on servers, unlike using AMD Gpus which can be found on the backend.
Same goes for games because most gamers either have an AMD or an Nvidia graphics card as playing on Mac is still rare, so priority should be supporting those platforms
Its probably awesome to use Metal and everything but the vendor lock-in sounds like an issue.
It has been easy. All modern GPU APIs are basically the same now unless you're relying on the most cutting edge features. I've found that converting between MSL, OpenGL (4.3+), and WebGPU to be trivial. Also, LLMs are pretty good at it on first pass.
JS has the fastest, most robust and widely deployed sandboxing engines (V8, followed closely by JavaScriptCore which is what Bun uses). It also has TypeScript which pairs well with agentic coding loops, and compiles to the aforementioned JavaScript which can run pretty much anywhere.
Note that "sandboxing" in this case is strictly runtime sandboxing - it's basically like having a separate process per event loop (as if you ran separate Node processes). It does not sandbox the machine context in which it runs (i.e. it's not VM-level containment).
When you say runtime sandboxing, are you referring to JavaScript agents? I haven't worked all that much with JavaScript execution environments outside of the browser so I'm not sure about what sandboxing mechanics are available.
Bun claims this feature is for running untrusted code (https://bun.com/reference/node/vm), while Node says "The node:vm module is not a security mechanism. Do not use it to run untrusted code." I'm not sure whom to believe.
It's interesting to see the difference in how both treat the module. It feels similar to a realm which makes me lean by default to not trusting it for untrusted code execution.
It looks like Bun also supports Shadow Realms which from my understanding was more intended for sandboxing (although I have no idea how resources are shared between a host environment and Shadow Realms, and how that might potentially differ from the node VM module).
The reference docs are auto generated from node’s TypeScript types. node:vm is better than using the same global object to run untrusted code, but it’s not really a sandbox
> It also has TypeScript which pairs well with agentic coding loops, (...)
I've heard that TypeScript is pretty rough on agentic coding loops because the idiomatic static type assertion code ends up requiring huge amounts of context to handle in a meaningful way. Is there any truth to it?
> Not sure where you heard this but general sentiment is the opposite.
My personal experience and anecdotal evidence is in line with this hypothesis. Using the likes of Microsoft's own Copilot with small simple greenfield TypeScript 5 projects results in surprisingly poor results the minute you start leaning heavily on type safety and idiomatic techniques such as branded types.
> There was recently a conference which was themed around the idea that typescript monorepos are the best way to build with AI
It's especially tricky since monorepos are an obvious antipattern to begin with. They're a de-separation of concerns: an encouragement to blur the unit boundaries, not write docs, create unstable APIs (updating all usages at once when they change), and generally to let complexity spread unchecked.
Hate to say it but this sounds like a skill issue. The reason Typescript monorepos are gaining popularity for building with AI is because of how powerful TS's inference system is. If you are writing lots of types you are doing it wrong.
You declare your schema with a good TS ORM then use something like TRPC to get type inference from your schemas in your route handlers and your front end.
You get an enforced single source of truth that keeps the AI on track with a very small amount of code compared to something like Java.
This really only applies to full stack SAAS apps though.
> It also has TypeScript which pairs well with agentic coding loops
The language syntax has nothing to do with it pairing well with agentic coding loops.
Considering how close Typescript and C# are syntactically, and C#'s speed advantage over JS among many other things would make C# the main language for building Agents. It is not and that's because the early SDKs were JS and Python.
Typescript is probably generally a good LLM language because
- static types
- tons and tons of training data
Kind of tangent but I used to think static types were a must-have for LLM generated code. But the most magical and impressively awesome thing I’ve seen for LLM code generation is “calva backseat driver”, a vscode extension that lets copilot evaluate clojure expressions and generally do REPL stuff.
It can write MUCH cleaner and more capable code, using all sorts of libraries that it’s unfamiliar with, because it can mess around and try stuff just like a human would. It’s mind blowingly cool!!
> C#'s speed advantage over JS among many other things would make C# the main language
Nobody cares about this, JS is plenty fast for LLM needs. If maximum performance was necessary, you're better off using Go because of fast compiler and better performance.
And that was my point. The choice of using JS/TS for LLM stuff was made for us based on initial wave of SDK availabilities. Nothing to do with language merits.
This has always been the case. The Java and C# ecosystems prioritise stability and scale. They wait for ideas to prove themselves in other languages like Erlang, Python, Go, Scala, and so on, and then adopt the successful ones. Last-mover advantage. That said, there are some caveats. Java is still missing value types, while C# has moved quickly with async/await rather than adopting models like goroutines or virtual threads, which can sometimes limit concurrency ergonomics for the developer.
This is one of those, "in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is" issues.
In their, quality software can be written in any programming language.
In practice, folks who use Python or JavaScript as their application programming language start from a position of just not carrying very much about correctness or performance. Folks who use languages like Java or C#, do. And you can see the downstream effects of this in the difference in the production-grade developer experience and the quality of packages on offer in PIP and NPM versus Maven and NuGet.
As a developer that switches between java, python and typescript every day I think this is fairly myopic opinion. Being siloed to one lang for long enough tends to brings out our tribalistic tendencies, tread carefully.
I've seen codebases of varying quality in nearly every language, "enterprise" and otherwise. I've worked at a C# shop and it was no better or worse than the java/kotlin/typescript ones I've worked at.
You can blame the "average" developer in a language for "not caring ", but more likely than not you're just observing the friction imposed by older packaging systems. Modern languages are usually coupled with package managers that make it trivial to publish language artifacts to package hubs, whereas gradle for example is it's own brand of hell just to get your code to build.
That's not a fair comparison. In your example, you're talking about the average of developers in a language. In this situation, it's specific developers choosing between languages. Having the developers you already have choose language A or B makes no difference to their code quality (assuming they're proficient with both)
These are statements these developers will make themselves. They will say they don't like more strictly typed languages because they feel constrained and slowed down in development. They will argue that the performance hit is worth the trade offs.
> Nonsense. Average Java/C# is an enterprise monkey who barely knows outside of their grotesque codebase.
Netflix is Java. Amazon is mostly Java. Some of the biggest open source projects in the world are Java. Unity and Godot both use C# for scripting.
I don't know where you're getting the impression that Java and C# are somehow only for "enterprise monkey who barely knows outside of their grotesque codebase"
> Netflix is Java. Amazon is mostly Java. Some of the biggest open source projects in the world are Java. Unity and Godot both use C# for scripting.
You can add Meta, Google and Palantir to your list and it won’t change that average Java dev is from an Eastern hemisphere and knows nothing about Java outside of JavaEE/Spring.
A typical backend developer using C#/Java is likely solving more complicated problems and having all the concerns of an enterprise system to worry about and maintain.
Dismissing a dev or a system because it is enterprisy is a weak argument to make against a language. A language being used a lot in an enterprise to carry the weight of the business is a sign the language is actually great and reliable enough.
I’m not dismissing Java, I’ve spent decades writing it and know what it is capable of, but it is laughable to hear that average Java dev cares more about performance or correctness than Python/JS dev.
All of them explicitly don’t have to care about performance from the start because of VMs + GC, only when scale starts to matter you start to optimize.
Tooling argument is especially funny to me, given how shit tooling ecosystem is. Sure it is ol’ reliable, but average Java dev is so stuck in their ways that they’ve never even tried to dwell out of their Java cave to see what’s out there.
IntelliJ consuming ALL of RAM, literally as much as it can get hands on. Gradle taking what’s left, rebuilds taking minutes to complete or requiring elaborate setup to have proper hot reload. Both TS and Python have far more expressive and powerful type systems than even modern Java. “Production grade tooling” my ass.
Funny to see Java shmucks looking down at JS/Python folks, as if Java at the time wasn’t picked for literally same reasons as Python/JS nowadays.
TS is enormous, has endless training data, and can interact with virtually anything on the Internet these days.
Also, strong typing is very very useful for AI coding context.
What do you mean by "failing tests", are you talking about runtime code? TypeScript erases all types at compile so these wouldn't affect tests. Unless you meant "compile errors" instead.
I've noticed LLMs just slap on "as any" to solve compile errors in TypeScript code, maybe this is common in the training data. I frequently have to call this out in code review, in many cases it wasn't even a necessary assertion, but it's now turned a variable into "any" which can cause downstream problems or future problems
The answer is typescript is a much simpler and more pleasant developer experience than any other language. These are products they need to, and often originate from, fast churn of code/features.
Otherwise they’d be building these types of things in Rust.
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