Comment by 9dev
6 days ago
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.
6 days ago
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