entr VS swc-node

entr ("Event Notify Test Runner"; GitHub), is a command-line tool written by Eric Radman that allows running arbitrary commands whenever files change.

I use something very similar on https://lunar.fyi and https://lowtechguys.com but I wouldn’t call this “simple” anymore.

They use Jinja templating, I prefer Slim (https://github.com/slim-template/slim#syntax-example) which has a more Pythonic syntax (there is plim [0] in Python for that)

I use Tailwind as well for terse styling and fast experimentation (allows me to write a darkMode-aware and responsive 100 line CSS in a single line with about 10 classes)

For interaction I can write CoffeeScript directly in the page [1] and have it compiled by plim.

I run a Caddy static server [2] and use Syncthing [3] to have every file save deployed instantly to my Hetzner server.

I use entr [4] and livereloadx [5] to rebuild the pages and do hot reload on file save. All the commands are managed in a simple Makefile [6]

———

You can already see how the footnotes take up a large chunk of this comment, this is not my idea of simple. Sure, the end result is readable static HTML and I never have to fight obscure React errors, but it’s a high effort setup for starters.

Simple for me would be: write markdown files for pages, a simple CSS for general styling (should be optional), click to deploy on my domain. Images should automatically be resized to multiple sizes and optimized, videos re-encoded for smaller filesize etc.

I have mostly implemented that for myself (https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/How%20I%20write%20this%20blog...) but it feels fragile. I’d rather pay for a professional solution.

[0] https://plim.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[1] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/src/rcmd...

[2] https://caddyserver.com/docs/command-line#caddy-file-server

[3] https://syncthing.net

[4] https://github.com/eradman/entr

[5] https://nitoyon.github.io/livereloadx/

[6] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/Makefile

Try entr for fast reloading. Another one is hupper.

entr

swc-node is much faster. No typechecking but you can have that running as a separate process with typescript in watch mode. Basically never have to wait for compiles or typechecking checking then.

fwiw swc has an official loader: https://github.com/swc-project/swc-node

I actually just switched my team's app over to use https://github.com/Brooooooklyn/swc-node for our Jest tests, but if we're going to upgrade to Next 12 it'd be nice to reuse whatever's included there.

I actually upgraded my team's Jest config to use https://github.com/Brooooooklyn/swc-node a few weeks ago. However, our Jenkins CI agents run RHEL7, and neither of the Linux binary targets would run. The `x64-gnu` binary needed a `GLIBC_2_23` symbol when only 2.18 was available, and the `x64-musl` binary had no `musl-libc` on the machine. I don't own the Jenkins agents, so I couldn't install other deps myself.

I ended up building `musl-libc` from source on another RHEL7 agent, committed the `.so` to our repo, and added that to the `LD_LIBRARY_PATH` in our Jenkinsfile, and actually got that working.

I did see some mentions that Rust could build to target an older GLibc ( https://kobzol.github.io/rust/ci/2021/05/07/building-rust-bi... ), so I'm curious if Next is going to use copies of SWC built that way for better compat or if it will require more workarounds on my part.

I'm very curious if the Next SWC binaries