Enhancing embedded systems development with TS\(^-\)

The lack of flexibility and safety in C language development has been criticized for a long time, causing detriments to the development cycle and software quality in the embedded systems domain. TypeScript, as an optionally-typed dynamic language, offers the flexibility and safety that developers desire. With the advancement of Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation technologies for TypeScript and JavaScript, it has become feasible to write embedded applications using TypeScript. Despite the availability of writing AOT compiled programs with TypeScript, implementing a compiler toolchain for this purpose requires substantial effort. To simplify the design of languages and compilers, this paper presents a new compiler toolchain design methodology called TS\(^-\), which advocates the generation of target intermediate language code (such as C) from TypeScript rather than the construction of higher-level compiler tools and type systems on top of the intermediate language. TS\(^-\) not only simplifies the design of the system but also provides developers with a quasi-native TypeScript development experience. This paper also presents Ts2Wasm, a prototype that implements TS\(^-\) and allows compiling a language subset of TypeScript to WebAssembly (WASM). The tests in the TypeScript repository show that Ts2Wasm provides 3.8× as many features compared to the intermediate language (AssemblyScript). Regarding performance, Ts2Wasm offers a significant speed-up of 1.4× to 19×. Meanwhile, it imposes over 65% less memory overhead compared to Node.js in most cases.