Comment by morelisp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by morelisp | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> I can ship it and the binary will work

In this scenario, the binary is your ES3 or ES5 or what have you.

Compiling Go to an x86 ABI, Rust to the same x86 ABI, C to the same x86 ABI, etc. is an analogous problem to "shipping dozens of plaintext source code files over the wire that then might get executed in an environment you have no control over". It's harder, by order of magnitude and on every axis, than compiling TS, ES2015, whatever, all down to some lesser ES version. And yet these compilers are faster, more effective, and easier to use.

You've missed my point about static vs. dynamic linking entirely. The point is that C compilers did "bundling" for years while supporting dynamic linking, and now you're trying to say JavaScript is tackling some way more difficult problem when it has a much simpler language-to-"ABI" translation process and doesn't even need to support that?

As you say, this maybe isn't a fruitful discussion - but it's a true one. JS tooling developers got seriously deluded about the novelty of their problems and quality of solution at some point ca. 2014, and we will be dealing with the results for another decade or more. At the very least let's start being honest about it.

I tend to agree with the overall thrust of your argument and the conclusion you're driving toward, but it's at least interesting to note that the distribution model of the web puts unique pressure on tools to ship dramatically smaller payloads. In Go or Rust, we ship debug symbols in production builds by default (or whatever it is which give us stack traces on panic), but in JS sourcemaps typically aren't shipped in production builds because they are too bulky. Similarly, there are a litany of caching concerns which apply in the browser world but not natively.

I also think that invoking "C compilers did X" weakens your argument because the C build ecosystem is quite a lot worse than the JS ecosystem and without any good excuses (its ecosystem is not rapidly evolving, there is no distribution model putting comparable pressure on latency, etc).

But in general, I agree that there is a lot the JS world could learn from the native world.

> the C build ecosystem is quite a lot worse than the JS ecosystem

Other than module packaging (and that's admittedly a big "other than"), I don't agree. Esbuild is the first tool I used that's even close to e.g. Make in comprehensibility (~ ease of use x flexibility x ability to debug when something goes wrong). That's a pretty low bar, and I don't know how long esbuild will stay that way.

Agree to disagree I guess. I don't want to go to bat for JS, but I've done more than my share of C and C++ and Make, CMake, Autotools, etc are just fucking nuts, and that's ignoring the fact that they completely punt on package management. JS is painful by the standards of modern programming languages, but C and C++ are on the next level.

"Stockholm Syndrome" is the only way I can rationalize people vouching for C or C++ (or JS, to a significantly-lesser-but-still-not-negligible extent) build tooling.

I'm not trying to argue that it is harder, just different in some ways and ignoring that for the sake of "javascript bad" isn' going to change the point that there are challenges involved. Nevertheless I understand your pint a lot better now, thanks for the explanation. I think we are both on the same page that the JS ecosystem overall is not in a good shape. But, you know, maybe THIS wave of new shiny tools is finally solving the issues once and for all (not holding my breath though...)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com