I tried to compile TypeScript into a native binary with scriptc

TL;DR: I tried to compile the TypeScript 6 compiler into a native binary with scriptc , and I failed — it got 90% of the way there and then hit an internal compiler error it couldn't get past, so there is no native tsc at the end of this story. But it's a failure worth having: I learned exactly where a week-old TypeScript-to-native compiler runs out of road, and I got some interesting numbers along the way. So when scriptc was released to the public a few days ago, I knew exactly how my week was going to end. If you haven't seen it yet, scriptc is a compiler that takes TypeScript — plain, ordinary TypeScript, no special dialect, no annotations — and turns it into a small, fast native binary. No Node.js. No V8. No JavaScript engine shipped alongside your code. A "hello world" comes out at around 320KB and starts in a few milliseconds. The pitch is bold: what compiles behaves byte-for-byte like Node . It does this with a three-tier model — most code lowers straight to native, anything too dynamic can opt into an embedded engine with a --dynamic flag, and the truly impossible fails at build time with a precise diagnostic instead of a surprise. It's experimental. It's early. It's exactly the kind of thing I can't leave alone. And almost immediately, a mischievous thought showed up: could I compile TypeScript itself? Not a toy. Not a fibonacci function. The actual compiler — tsc — the thing that has type-checked basically every line of TypeScript I've ever written. If scriptc can turn that into a native binary, it can turn anything into a native binary. It felt like the ultimate stress test, and I wanted to see it either fly or fall over. Why 6, and not 7? Here's where the timing gets interesting. If you've been following the TypeScript roadmap, you know the ground just shifted. TypeScript 6.0 shipped as the final JavaScript-based release of the compiler, and TypeScript 7 is the ground-up rewrite in Go — the "native" port the team has been building in the open. So we now