Comment by VPenkov
8 hours ago
Oxc is not the first Rust-based product on the market that handles JS, there is also SWC which is now reasonably mature. I maintain a reasonably large frontend project (in the 10s of thousands of components) and SWC has been our default for years. SWC has made sure that there is actually a very decent support for JS in the Rust ecosystem.
I'd say my biggest concern is that the same engineers who use JS as their main language are usually not as adept with Rust and may experience difficulties maintaining and extending their toolchain, e.g. writing custom linting rules. But most engineers seem to be interested in learning so I haven't seen my concern materialize.
It's not like JS isn't already implemented in a language that's a lot more similar to Rust anyhow though. When the browser or Node or whatever other runtime you're using is already in a different language out of necessity, is it really that weird for the tooling to also optimize for the out-of-the-box experience rather than people hacking on them?
Even as someone who writes Rust professionally, I also wouldn't necessarily expect every Rust engineer to be super comfortable jumping into the codebase of the compiler or linter or whatever to be able to hack on it easily because there's a lot of domain knowledge in compilers and interpreters and language tooling, and most people won't end up needing experience with implementing them. Honestly, I'd be pretty strongly against a project I work on switching to a custom fork of a linting tool because a teammate decided they wanted to add extra rules for it or something, so I don't see it as a huge loss that it might end up being something people will need to spend personal time on if they want to explore.