Vercel Labs has published scriptc, an open-source compiler that abandons the usual JavaScript runtime model: instead of translating TypeScript into JavaScript, it produces native binaries for different platforms. With static compilation, neither Node.js nor a JavaScript engine is required, and the resulting executable embeds a JavaScript runtime only in exceptional cases.

Benchmarks on the project's GitHub page, measured on an unspecified Apple M-series machine, compare scriptc against similar workloads in Node.js, Go, Rust and Zig. In one example project, startup time reportedly dropped from 47 milliseconds under Node.js to 2.4 milliseconds. The static binary takes up around 200 KByte, versus roughly 2 MByte for the Go equivalent, and peak memory consumption was 4 MByte compared to up to 116 MByte for Node.js.

To maximize compatibility with existing Node.js code, scriptc natively implements large parts of the Node.js API, including fs, path, crypto, http, https, net, dns, timers and fetch. When dynamic features are involved — npm dependencies or code typed with any — the binary additionally embeds the QuickJS-NG JavaScript engine.

scriptc is installed via npm install -g scriptc and requires Clang as the compiler frontend. macOS arm64 is the primary platform; Linux and Windows binaries are produced through cross-compilation. The project is at a very early stage (version 0.0.x) with no stable release yet.