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Typhon

Prior Art

Typhon stands on a lot of shoulders. This page lists the ones that mattered most.

Languages

TypeScript

The closest analogue. Scanner → parser → binder → checker → emitter. The checker.ts file is the canonical reference for structural subtyping at scale. The “superset that emits the host language” framing is directly borrowed.

Rust

let / let mut, Result<T, E> and the ? operator, impl blocks. Typhon borrows the surface; it does not borrow ownership, borrowing, or lifetimes.

Mojo

The cautionary tale. Pitched as a “Python superset”, then walked back. The lesson: be honest about what subset of Python .ty accepts and emit a clean error for the rest. Typhon never tries to be a full Python superset; some patterns require escape hatches (unsafe:, class!).

Elixir

with-chains for sequenced fallible operations are borrowed from Elixir’s with form.

Swift

guard let early-return narrowing is a fixed idea in modern languages; Typhon’s guard x = expr else: ... is the Pythonic spelling.

Zig

comptime evaluation borrows the name and the basic idea — a sandboxed interpreter that runs at compile time. Typhon’s sandbox is much smaller than Zig’s by design.

Coconut, Hy, Cython

Older Python supersets. Useful for emission patterns; none built on modern Rust tooling.

Tools

rust-analyzer

The cleanest example of a Salsa-based incremental compiler with an LSP. Crate layering directly transferable. Reading rust-analyzer’s architecture docs is recommended before contributing to tyc-lsp or tyc-db.

ty and Pyrefly

Rust-based Python type checkers (Astral and Meta respectively). Both shipped in 2025; both architectural references for Typhon’s checker. The tyc ty subcommand defers to Astral’s ty for second-opinion checking.

oxc

Rust-based JavaScript toolchain. Workspace layout (oxc_parser, oxc_semantic, oxc_linter, oxc_formatter, oxlint binary) is the template for tyc.

Ruff

Astral’s Python linter/formatter. Source of ruff_python_parser, ruff_python_ast, ruff_python_codegen, ruff_python_formatter. All vendored under tyc/vendor/.

Salsa

The incremental computation framework that powers rust-analyzer and ty. Free cancellation, parallel queries, durability levels. Wrapped at one-function granularity to insulate against API changes.

tower-lsp-server

The active community fork of tower-lsp tracking lsp-types 0.97+. Used for tyc lsp.

miette

Best-in-class source-span diagnostics. The reason Typhon’s error messages look as nice as rustc’s.

clap v4 (derive)

Standard Rust CLI framework. Powers tyc’s subcommands.

What we read

Naming

The project ships as Typhon. Phonetic kinship with Python without sounding like a portmanteau. The mythology lines up (Typhon is the serpent-monster of Hesiod, sometimes treated as the father of Python). The binary is tyc, the file extension is .ty, the stub extension is .dty, the config file is typhon.toml.

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