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Why was SWC chosen instead of esbuild? I see esbuild in a lot more places.

Also with the developer of SWC joining next.js will the non-open-source parts (STC)[1] be released?

Because they "strongly believe Rust is the future of JS tooling." I'd agree honestly, I like Rust a lot more than Go. But that's a debate for another time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28157256

My cursory knowledge is Go is best for distributed services and things that heavily involve the network.

Rust is better for memory based operations due to its safety and speed.

But that's just total BS unless they are directly writing rust code.

If you are using tools like swc or esbuild, then you need to evaluate tool itself, not the language it was written in.

They hired one of the SWC devs, so they are directly writing rust code.

Of course you should care about the language the tool was written in. As another example, 1Password is redoing their mac app in electron. Many are upset about this and concerned it will lead to worse performance. Solely because of the technology being used.

Similarly here, evaluating esbuild vs swc inherently involves comparing their capabilities, benefits, potential etc. A lot of that is informed by the language its written in.

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