ts-native

Ts-native is a wrapper around AssemblyScript and wasm2c to generate some native applications from TypeScript. It first compile TypeScript to WASM, then WASM to C and finally from C to native machine code.

AssemblyScript is a an active project, with a big community around, so seem to be the right project to build a tool. All the TS logic is handle by AssemblyScript and all the memory management base on WebAssembly. Finally, wasm2c from wabt was build by the WebAssembly team, therefor seem to reliable tool to convert wasm files to C. Ts-native is simply putting all those tools together and bring some extra interface to access native feature like file system manipulation or creating some TCP communication...

Right now, it is only working on Linux.

Getting started

First we need install watb. On ubuntu add the following line in /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://cz.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu eoan main universe

Then install with apt:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install watb

We need to install as well gcc and some extra tools:

sudo apt install build-essential llvm-dev libclang-dev clang

Now, we can install ts-native:

yarn add ts-native
# or 
npm install ts-native

Let's create an example hello.ts:

import { print } from 'ts-native/io';
 
export function main(argc: i32, argsRef: i32): i32 {
    print(`Hello world\n`);
    return 0;
}

The first peculiarity one is going to notice when writing AssemblyScript is that its basic types are a bit different from TypeScript's in that it uses WebAssembly's more specific integer and floating point types, with JavaScript's number merely an alias of WebAssembly's f64.

Run the compiler:

npx ts-native ./hello.ts

Finally run the application:

./build/main

Standard library

AssemblyScript is only providing basic TypeScript logic but doesn't provide any feature to access native feature from the system. To solve this ts-native is providing a standard library:

ts-native/core

// return the current working directory
function cwd(): string;

ts-native/io

// print string to stdout
function print(str: string): void;

ts-native/time

// calls a function or evaluates an expression after a specified number of milliseconds.
function setTimeout(cb: () => void, ms: i32): i32;
// clears a timer set with the setTimeout() method.
function clearTimeout(id: i32): void;