We Measured the LLM Token Cost of 5 Languages. TypeScript Costs 31% More Than JavaScript

Part 2 of “The Tokenomics of Web Development” — a controlled comparison of 22 web technologies, 115 idiomatic snippets, one tokenizer.

We’re used to judging programming languages by the familiar criteria:

• type safety;
• DX;
• performance;
• scalability.

For the last 5+ years the industry moved one way: type everything, TypeScript is the default, untyped JS is legacy. I don’t argue with that as an engineering practice. But with LLMs a new layer showed up that didn’t exist before: when code is read more and more by a model rather than a human, the habit of writing verbosely grows a bill — and it’s visible right there in the API. I decided to measure it.

In Part 1 I ran five frontend frameworks through the same test — Angular came out 38% heavier than Sveltefor identical components. In this part we drop down to the language itself, which runs the same...

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