Benchmarks
There are two questions worth measuring, and we keep them separate. Structural: what does Glyph reject by construction that TypeScript accepts? That's provable today, shown below. Reliability: do agents actually ship fewer defects in Glyph than in a well-configured strict-TypeScript setup? That's the number that decides adoption, and we don't have it yet. It's a study we're building, and we won't dress up a proxy as if it were that answer. (The real comparison isn't Glyph vs naive TS; it's Glyph vs strict TS + zod + eslint + ts-pattern.)
Not a statistic: paired demonstrations. Each is a mistake Glyph rejects and
tsc --strict accepts, reproducible from the
benchmarks directory.
Two mistakes agents make constantly (a missing match variant and
an unsafe cast) are rejected by Glyph and accepted by tsc --strict.
Wrong code that compiles is the expensive failure. Glyph won't let it.
Every symbol has exactly one declaration form: no overloads, decorators, or merged namespaces to scatter it.
A one-line Glyph edit produces a one-line TypeScript diff through the transpiler, and
glyph fmt adds no churn. The diff is the change, not the noise around it.
Safety usually costs length: Go and Rust, the other rows with static types and
explicit error handling, are the longest. Glyph has both and is not longer for it:
436 tokens to TypeScript's 478, about 9% fewer, level with Python, about 23% fewer
than Go and 30% fewer than Rust, on real cl100k_base counts of programs
that pass glyph check with tsc. The lead is in the function
with real control flow (parse_user, 132 to 174); on the one-line
slugify Glyph is longer (67 to 47) because it has no regex literal.
Three functions, a small sample. An earlier figure of 341 was measured on fixtures the
compiler did not accept and is withdrawn.
See the methodology and caveats →
The structural results above are reasons to expect Glyph helps; they are not proof
that it does. The proof is a differential study: the same agent, the same realistic tasks,
written once in Glyph and once in a fully-tooled strict-TypeScript setup
(tsconfig strict + typescript-eslint + ts-pattern + zod), scored on
escaped semantic defects and one-shot green-build rate. That's the number
five different reviewers told us would move them, so we're building it, and until it
exists these bars are a placeholder, not a claim.
The apparatus (a task corpus, a run/replay harness, and the pinned strongest-honest TS baseline) is in the benchmarks directory; the first real pilot (with its n, the model, and the cost stated on the label) publishes here the moment it runs. Whatever it shows.