esbuild VS swc

You will find an issue related to pureannotations in esbuild repository.

Vite (pronounced veet) was created by Evan You (Vue's creator) and launched in 2020. It uses native ES modules in the browser and esbuild for lightning-fast dev servers and Rollup for optimized production builds.

Pre-bundle all the dependencies on the "optimization boundary" list into node_modules/.vite/deps/ folder. This step is done by esbuild.

ESBuild is a bundler. The subtitle on the website is literally “An extremely fast bundler for the web”. To bundle, pass —-bundle flag.

https://esbuild.github.io/

esbuild for bunding both the client and server separately

> like individual loaders/modules are/were slow, rather than webpack itself

tbh this is just nitpicking, I'm not a react developer to do CRA debugging for them. They're paid by Facebook a couple orders of magnitude more than what we're making here, and if they're fine with the intact CRA configuration being that slow, while a third-party alternative rips through the massive pile of shit I'm working on while not bringing any obvious downsides, I'll just to the alternative.

It's a well known problem: esbuild, which is the base of vite's HMR, boasts of speeds dozens to hundreds of times faster than webpack:

https://github.com/evanw/esbuild?tab=readme-ov-file#why

I once wanted to contribute to the popular swc project (https://github.com/swc-project/swc). I cloned the repo, ran build, and a whooping 20GB was gone from my disk. The parser itself (https://github.com/swc-project/swc/blob/main/crates/swc_ecma...) has over a dozen dependencies, including serde.

Meanwhile, the heaviest JavaScript parser implemented in JavaScript is more lightweight.

I decided that I should leave this project alone and spend my time elsewhere.

For previous attempts at doing this in rust, see:

  1. stc [https://github.com/dudykr/stc] - Abandoned [https://github.com/swc-project/swc/issues/571#issuecomment-1915966297]

But I also had my Vitest build configured to use SWC, the compiler backend I had configured for Vitest, and it had issues of its own. SWC is cool. It's a TypeScript compiler written in Rust that is extremely fast, and - unlike tsc - it mostly handles rewriting import paths just fine. However, I did find that it rewrites index.mjs imports into directory imports.

@vitejs/plugin-react-swc uses SWC for Fast Refresh

# React + Vite This template provides a minimal setup to get React working in Vite with HMR and some ESLint rules. Currently, two official plugins are available: - [@vitejs/plugin-react](https://github.com/vitejs/vite-plugin-react/blob/main/packages/plugin-react/README.md) uses [Babel](https://babeljs.io/) for Fast Refresh - [@vitejs/plugin-react-swc](https://github.com/vitejs/vite-plugin-react-swc) uses [SWC](https://swc.rs/) for Fast Refresh # Fresh-Starts

Firstly, tools such as Vite and SWC cannot be used for a fee. There are too many products of the same type, so if you charge, everyone won't need to use them. Of course, being free does not mean it has no value. With more users, there is a great potential for natural value.

However, new tools such as SWC and esbulid now also support JS code compression, and their execution efficiency is higher. After all, Rust or Go inherently have much higher execution efficiency than JS.

> Look at the dependency tree for a next

Looks ok to me: https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=next

Ironically, most of the dependencies are actually Rust crates used by swc and turbopack [1]. Try running cargo tree on either of those crates, it's enlightening to say the least. And of course, Node has a built in file watcher, and even the most popular third party package for file watching (Chokidar) has a single dependency [3].

[1] https://github.com/vercel/turborepo/blob/main/Cargo.toml

[2] https://github.com/swc-project/swc/blob/main/Cargo.toml

[3] https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=chokidar

It does!

Node uses swc to do this. The swc implementation of blank-spacing (implemented here <https://github.com/swc-project/swc/pull/9144>) was inspired by the author of ts-blank-space here: <https://gist.github.com/acutmore/27444a9dbfa515a10b25f0d4707...>. It has just taken a little longer to release the original implementation.