Hephaestus: Testing the TypeScript compiler

The 2010s decade marked a beginning for widespread compiler testing with the release of programs like Csmith, a C program generator that since its release has found and reported over 400 compiler bugs. However, as highlighted by a recent study, the research on compiler testing has critically neglected the front-end component of compilers, leaving unfound bugs in the type checking procedure of compilers. More specifically, this could lead to the compilers of statically-typed languages, which utilize features such as type inference, both accepting erroneous programs and rejecting correct ones. Hephaestus is a tool designed to test the compilers of three languages, namely Java, Kotlin, and Groovy. It has already successfully detected over 150 bugs in the compilers of these languages. I propose a way to extend Hephaestus for it to be able to successfully test and detect bugs in the compiler of TypeScript. This can be a great contribution to the user-base and community of TypeScript, a language that has risen in popularity and usage in the past years. Hephaestus detects bugs by: 1. generating semantically-valid programs that (a) utilize parametric polymorphism and (b) are abstract 2. generating these programs in an intermediate representation (IR), an OOP language that supports parametric polymorphism and type inference 3. using translators to convert the abstract IR program to the desired language.