spec VS TypeScript

Compare spec vs TypeScript and see what are their differences.

spec

WebAssembly specification, reference interpreter, and test suite. (by WebAssembly)

TypeScript

TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that compiles to clean JavaScript output. (by microsoft)
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spec TypeScript
12 1,305
3,061 97,944
0.8% 1.0%
8.3 9.9
6 days ago 5 days ago
WebAssembly TypeScript
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

spec

Posts with mentions or reviews of spec. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-18.
  • WASM Instructions
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Feb 2024
    You can parse many things from this file, what are you trying to extract?

    https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/blob/main/document/core/...

  • The fastest word counter in JavaScript
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Apr 2023
    Still strikes me as super sad JS never got SIMD support. It seemed like there were some strong candidate specs. On Node there are some add-on npm libraries that implement.

    My understanding was the main protest was that we would get wasm & some certain implementers said they wanted to focus their energy on wasm.

    That was well over half a decade ago & wasm is still in incredible infancy, with basically only statically linked capabilities in the spec.

    Wasm SIMD proposal itself only merged into wasm in November 2021. https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/pull/1391

    It seems really unfortunate to have decided to keep JS the slow inferior language.

  • Is Blazor server and Blazor Webassembly going to be a big market? I am trying to figure out a niche to go with and I have some asp.net core mvc experience but I am working on a e-commerce .net6 Blazor Webassembly app.
    2 projects | /r/csharp | 19 Dec 2022
    Blazor and WASM itself (outside of dotnet) are relatively new tools and they already show impressive results. They will keep getting better with every release. E.g. this proposal https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/blob/main/proposals/simd/SIMD.md which should bring WASM closer to "near native speed". Blazor already started working on it true.
  • Smolnes: A NES Emulator In
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Oct 2022
    Big fan of this author's work.

    They have a Gameboy emulator written in C, which can be compiled to WASM and run in the browser.

    https://github.com/binji/binjgb

    I learned a lot from the code.

    Also I love this project with a bunch of demos in hand-written WebAssembly Text (WAT) format, which is like low-level Lisp that works only with raw memory, numbers, and minimal syntax.

    https://github.com/binji/raw-wasm

    Then I discovered the same author is quite active in the WebAssembly ecosystem, including specs and tooling. Fascinating stuff!

    https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec

    https://github.com/WebAssembly/wabt

  • Exploring WebAssembly, The Underlying Technology Behind Blazor WASM.
    1 project | dev.to | 16 Jul 2022
    [The WebAssembly specification (https://webassembly.github.io/spec/) maintains that the standards apply to more than just the browser host, but also to any other compliant host runtime (what the specification refers to as an embedder).
  • Show HN: We are trying to (finally) get tail-calls into the WebAssembly standard
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Jul 2022
    Heya,

    (1) Thank you for implementing this in JSC!! I hope they take it, it makes it into Safari, and the tail-call proposal advances.

    (2) I don't think you are exactly right about the call stack being observable via thrown exceptions. There's no formal spec for the v3 exceptions proposal yet, but in the documents and tests, there's nothing that would change in WebAssembly core to make the call stack observable. It's true that the proposal amends the JS API (but only the JS API) to describe a traceStack=true option; from Wasm's perspective I understand that's just an ordinary exception that happens to include an externref value (just like any other value) to which Wasm itself attaches no special significance. The engine can attach a stack trace if it wants, but there's no requirement (here) about what that stack trace contains or whether some frames might have been optimized out.

    (3) I think the real reason that a Wasm engine can't implicitly make tail calls proper is that the spec tests forbid it, basically because they didn't want the implementation base to split by having some engines perform an optimization that changes the space complexity of a program, which some programs would have started to depend on (the spec tests say: "Implementations are required to have every call consume some abstract resource towards exhausting some abstract finite limit, such that infinitely recursive test cases reliably trap in finite time. This is because otherwise applications could come to depend on it on those implementations and be incompatible with implementations that don't do it (or don't do it under the same circumstances.)" More discussion here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/issues/150

  • WebAssembly 2.0 Working Draft
    21 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Apr 2022
  • A challenger to the throne of vector graphics. SVG is dead, long live TinyVG
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Dec 2021
  • Microsoft joins Bytecode Alliance to advance WebAssembly – aka the thing that lets you run compiled C/C++/Rust code in browsers
    12 projects | /r/programming | 28 Apr 2021
    The WASM paper discusses that in the final section: https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/blob/master/papers/pldi2017.pdf
  • Is there a small, well-specified language with lots of example programs?
    2 projects | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 4 Jan 2021
    WebAssembly has a formal specification that includes both operational semantics and natural language-based descriptions of everything in the language. The official repository also has a lot of tests. Besides tests, you should be able to find lots of examples by searching.

TypeScript

Posts with mentions or reviews of TypeScript. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-25.
  • JSR Is Not Another Package Manager
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Apr 2024
    Regular expressions are part of the language, so it's not so unreasonable that TypeScript should parse them and take their semantics into account. Indeed, TypeScript 5.5 will include [new support for syntax checking of regular expressions](https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/pull/55600), and presumably they'll eventually be able to solve the problem the GP highlighted on top of those foundations.
  • TypeScript Essentials: Distinguishing Types with Branding
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Apr 2024
    Dedicated syntax for creating unique subsets of a type that denote a particular refinement is a longstanding ask[2] - and very useful, we've experimented with implementations.[3]

    I don't think it has any relation to runtime type checking at all. It's refinement types, [4] or newtypes[5] depending on the details and how you shape it.

    [1] https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/blob/main/src/compil...

  • What is an Abstract Syntax Tree in Programming?
    13 projects | dev.to | 5 Apr 2024
    GitHub | Website
  • Smart Contract Programming Languages: sCrypt vs. Solidity
    2 projects | dev.to | 5 Apr 2024
    Learning Curve and Developer Tooling sCrypt is an embedded Domain Specific Language (eDSL) based on TypeScript. It is strictly a subset of TypeScript, so all sCrypt code is valid TypeScript. TypeScript is chosen as the host language because it provides an easy, familiar language (JavaScript), but with type safety. There’s an abundance of learning materials available for TypeScript and thus sCrypt, including online tutorials, courses, documentation, and community support. This makes it relatively easy for beginners to start learning. It also has a vast ecosystem with numerous libraries and frameworks (e.g., React, Angular, Vue) that can simplify development and integration with Web2 applications.
  • Understanding the Difference Between Type and Interface in TypeScript
    1 project | dev.to | 2 Apr 2024
    As a JavaScript or TypeScript developer, you might have come across the terms type and interface when working with complex data structures or defining custom types. While both serve similar purposes, they have distinct characteristics that influence when to use them. In this blog post, we'll delve into the differences between types and interfaces in TypeScript, providing examples to aid your understanding.
  • Type-Safe Fetch with Next.js, Strapi, and OpenAPI
    8 projects | dev.to | 2 Apr 2024
    TypeScript helps you in many ways in the context of a JavaScript app. It makes it easier to consume interfaces of any type.
  • Proposal: Types as Configuration
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Apr 2024
  • How to scrape Amazon products
    4 projects | dev.to | 1 Apr 2024
    In this guide, we'll be extracting information from Amazon product pages using the power of TypeScript in combination with the Cheerio and Crawlee libraries. We'll explore how to retrieve and extract detailed product data such as titles, prices, image URLs, and more from Amazon's vast marketplace. We'll also discuss handling potential blocking issues that may arise during the scraping process.
  • Shared Tailwind Setup For Micro Frontend Application with Nx Workspace
    6 projects | dev.to | 29 Mar 2024
    TypeScript
  • Building a Dynamic Job Board with Issues Github, Next.js, Tailwind CSS and MobX-State-Tree
    6 projects | dev.to | 28 Mar 2024
    Familiarity with TypeScript, React and Next.js

What are some alternatives?

When comparing spec and TypeScript you can also consider the following projects:

uwm-masters-thesis - My thesis for my Master's in Computer Science degree from the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee.

zod - TypeScript-first schema validation with static type inference

Oberon - Oberon parser, code model & browser, compiler and IDE with debugger

Flutter - Flutter makes it easy and fast to build beautiful apps for mobile and beyond

meetings - WebAssembly meetings (VC or in-person), agendas, and notes

Tailwind CSS - A utility-first CSS framework for rapid UI development.

component-model - Repository for design and specification of the Component Model

zx - A tool for writing better scripts

proposals - Tracking WebAssembly proposals

esbuild - An extremely fast bundler for the web

wit-bindgen - A language binding generator for WebAssembly interface types

gray-matter - Smarter YAML front matter parser, used by metalsmith, Gatsby, Netlify, Assemble, mapbox-gl, phenomic, vuejs vitepress, TinaCMS, Shopify Polaris, Ant Design, Astro, hashicorp, garden, slidev, saber, sourcegraph, and many others. Simple to use, and battle tested. Parses YAML by default but can also parse JSON Front Matter, Coffee Front Matter, TOML Front Matter, and has support for custom parsers. Please follow gray-matter's author: https://github.com/jonschlinkert