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Comment by conartist6 | Hacker News Reader

It's funny to me that people should look at this situation and say "this is OK".

The upshot of all these projects to make JS tools faster is a fractured ecosystem. Who if given the choice would honestly want to try to maintain Javascript tools written in a mixture of Rust and Go? Already we've seemingly committed to having a big schism in the middle. And the new tools don't replace the old ones, so to own your tools you'll need to make Rust, Go, and JS all work together using a mix of clean modern technology and shims into horribly legacy technology. We have to maintain everything, old and new, because it's all still critical, engineers have to learn everything, old and new, because it's all still critical.

All I really see is an explosion of complexity.

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So, what's your counterproposal?

Each of these tools provides real value.

* Bundlers drastically improve runtime performance, but it's tricky to figure out what to bundle where and how.

* Linting tools and type-safety checkers detect bugs before they happen, but they can be arbitrarily complex, and benefit from type annotations. (TypeScript won the type-annotation war in the marketplace against other competing type annotations, including Meta's Flow and Google's Closure Compiler.)

* Code formatters automatically ensure consistent formatting.

* Package installers are really important and a hugely complex problem in a performance-sensitive and security-sensitive area. (Managing dependency conflicts/diamonds, caching, platform-specific builds…)

As long as developers benefit from using bundlers, linters, type checkers, code formatters, and package installers, and as long as it's possible to make these tools faster and/or better, someone's going to try.

And here you are, incredulous that anyone thinks this is OK…? Because we should just … not use these tools? Not make them faster? Not improve their DX? Standardize on one and then staunchly refuse to improve it…?

I'm being a little coy because I do have a very detailed proposal.

In want the JS toolchain to stay written in JS but I want to unify the design and architecture of all those tools you mentioned so that they can all use a common syntax tree format and so can share data, e.g. between the linter and the formatter or the bundler and the type checker.

Yeah it's a shame that few people realize running 3 (or more) different programs that have separate parsing and AST is the bigger problem.

Not just because of perf (though the perf aspect is annoying) but because of how often the three will get out of sync and produce bizarre results

Hasn't that already been tried (10+ years ago) with projects like https://github.com/jquery/esprima ? Which have since seen usage dramatically reduced for performance reasons.

Yeah, you are correct. But that means I have the benefit of ten years development in the web platform, as well as having hindsight on the earlier effort.

I would say the reason the perf costs feel bad there is that the abstraction was unsuccessful. Throughtput isn't all that big a deal for a parser at all if you only need to parse the parts of the code that have actually changed

You can rip fast builds from my cold, dead hands. I’m not looking back to JS-only tooling, and I was there since the gulp days.

All I can say for sure is that the reason the old tools were slow was not that the JS runtime is impossible to build fast tools with.

And anyway, these new tools tend to have a "perf cliff" where you get all the speed of the new tool as long as you stay away from the JS integration API sued to support the "long tail" of uses cases. Once you fall off the cliff though, you're back to the old slow-JS cost regime...

> […] the reason the old tools were slow was not that the JS runtime is impossible to build fast tools with.

I don't have them at hand right now but there are various detailed write-ups from the maintainers of Vite, oxc, and more, that are addressing this specific argument to point out that indeed the JavaScript runtime was a hard limitation on the throughput they could achieve, making Rust a necessity to improve build speeds.

Why do you need high throughput though? Isn't that a metric of how fast a batch processing system is?

Why are we still treating batch processing as the controlling paradigm for tools that work on code. If we fully embraced incremental recomputation and shifted the focus to how to avoid re-doing the same work over and over, batch processing speed would become largely irrelevant as a metric

> We have to maintain everything, old and new, because it's all still critical, engineers have to learn everything, old and new, because it's all still critical.

I completely agree but maintenance is a maintainer problem, not the consumer or user of the package, at least according to the average user of open source nowadays. One of two things are come out of this: either the wheels start falling off once the community can no longer maintain this fractured tooling as you point out, or companies are going to pick up the slack and start stewarding it (likely looking for opportunities to capture tooling and profit along the way).

Neither outcome looks particularly appealing.

Yes, this just sounds like the run-of-the-mill specialization issue that is affecting every industry (and has been affecting every industry before AI). Web devs learn Javascript/Typescript/frameworks, "middleware" developers learn Rust/Go/C++/etc. to build the web development frameworks, lower-level devs build that, etc. There shouldn’t be a strict need for someone who wants to make websites or web technology to learn Rust or Go unless they want to break into web framework development or WASM stuff. But again, this is just over-specialization that has been happening since forever (or at least since the Industrial revolution).

I look at it and don't really have an issue with it. I have been using tsc, vite, eslint, and prettier for years. I am in the process of switching my projects to tsgo (which will soon be tsc anyway), oxlint, and oxfmt. It's not a big deal and it's well worth the 10x speed increase. It would be nice if there was one toolchain to rule them all, but that is just not the world we live in.

How do you plan to track CVEs flagged on tsgo's native dependencies.

I only use it for typechecking locally and in CI. I don’t have it generating code. Of course, what is generating my code is esbuild and soon Rolldown, so same issue maybe. If CVEs in tsgo’s deps are a big risk to run locally, I would say I have much bigger problems than that — a hundred programs I run on my machine have this problem.

The good part is that the new tools do replace the old ones, while being compatible. The pattern is:

* Rolldown is compatible to Rollup's API and can use most Rollup plugins

* Oxlint supports JS plugins and is ESLint compatibel (can run ESLint rules easily)

* Oxfmt plans to support Prettier plugins, in turn using the power of the ecosystem

* and so on...

So you get better performance and can still work with your favorite plugins and extend tools "as before".

Regarding the "mix of technology" or tooling fatigue: I get that. We have to install a lot of tools, even for a simple application. This is where Vite+[0] will shine, bringing the modern and powerful tools together, making them even easier to adopt and reducing the divide in the ecosystem.

[0] https://viteplus.dev/

e: ahhh frick this is just stupid AI spam for this dude’s project.

Supports… some ESLint rules. It is not “easy” to add support to Oxlint for the rules it does not.

The projects at my work that “switched” to it now use both Eslint and Oxlint. It sucks, but at least a subset of errors are caught much faster.

Yeah, no. Real human here.

Oxlint does support core rules out of the box but has support for JS plugins[0] as mentioned. If you don't rely on a custom parser (so svelte or vue component for example) things just work. Even react compiler rules[1].

[0] https://oxc.rs/docs/guide/usage/linter/js-plugins.html [1] https://github.com/TheAlexLichter/oxlint-react-compiler-rule...

So as long as you only need the pre-installed software it's a great device eh. I'm the PC to your game console here. Parser extension? Piece of cake for us. Heck just to showboat we actually extended our es6 parser from our es3 parser, and then implemented each later standard as an extension of the earlier one. We're able to run parsers for pretty much any programming language, and making them super easy to write. We can do cross-language transforms with ease. We can be our own system of version control! We're going to be a real threat to GitHub. VoidZero is not even trying to do this stuff. Your vision is just so... small.

As said in another comment: Curious to see what you are coming up! Talk is cheap

Definitely read AI tonality into the earlier comment, noticed it didn't call out your relationship to it, then saw that you had a comment history plugging it, and made assumptions.

My apologies. I'll follow through to the links next time.

Vite+ is not “this dude’s project”, it’s made by the team that makes all the tools discussed in this article.

So you really think everyone in JS should have to learn Rust or else be excluded from sharing in the ownership of their critical infra..?

1) This is not what I said, no

2) With AI, languages and syntax matters even less nowadays.

3) There have been a good amount of contributors (e.g. for Oxc) that came out the JS world, so it isn't impossible

4) Realistically, the avg. web dev does not contribute to tooling internals, maximum custom rules or similar. The concepts are a bigger "hurdle" than the lang.

That still leaves you admitting that only a small fraction of the served community can really contribute. You'll need to keep all the best benefits of your work for the Plus users or else there would be no reason to buy Plus and no way to keep paying the few to do all the work for the many.

You're stuck telling people what they can't have (and shouldn't want) while I'm now in a position to just give people what they want. I admire the people who work there, but you need a new business model and fast because I am unequivocally going to collapse your current one.

> That still leaves you admitting that only a small fraction of the served community can really contribute.

Not really (see above).

> You'll need to keep all the best benefits of your work for the Plus users or else there would be no reason to buy Plus and no way to keep paying the few to do all the work for the many.

No, won't happen that way.

> You're stuck telling people what they can't have (and shouldn't want) while I'm now in a position to just give people what they want.

Didn't see any software of yours yet, only big talk so far sadly! Besides that, VoidZero will also be in a position to just give people what they want

VoidZero is betting I'm just talk, ok, that's fair. But the way you say it makes me think that your evaluation of me is mostly on hearsay, because if you had actually tried to find out how serious I am I suspect you'd be less flippant. You're welcome in the Discord!

As far as I'm aware oxlint only supports plugins for non type aware rules, and type aware rules themselves aren't fully stable because it relies on a fork of tsgo.

That is correct, every rule with a custom parser (e.g. vue/svelte/astro tempaltes) and also type-aware rules can't be used as JS plugin.

Type-aware rule are indeed not marked as stable but work like a charm. tsgolint is indeed tsgo + shims + some works, but that won't change soon as tsgo won't have a JS API for a while.

> All I really see is an explosion of complexity.

I thought this was the point of all development in the JavaScript/web ecosystem?

It's definitely an explosion of complexity but also something that AI can help manage. So :shrug: ...

Based on current trends, I don't think people care about knowing how all the parts work (even before these powerful LLMs came along) as long as the job gets done and things get shipped and it mostly works.

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