otto VS esbuild

robertkrimen/otto

Ummm, excuse me, but where the f&$k has this been hiding? I’ve been looking for ways to extend my go applications with scripting support. I started with Lua (worked ) then Python (worked but hacky) then javascript using otto [1]. However it lacks ES6 support so having pretty OOP js code is a non-starter. I would love to have Java as a runtime that can be executed from goroutines.

[1] https://github.com/robertkrimen/otto

Either call a JavaScript interpreter like node with exec.Command and read its stdout, or use a pure Go JavaScript interpreter like goja or otto.

Otto https://github.com/robertkrimen/otto Seems interesting. It lets me call Go functions from inside JS as well as return results. The fncs pattern reminds me a bit of how the template engine works.

> why host other languages

Here's an example:

I recently finished building https://subzo.com.au which allows customizing and ordering 3D models. The way the model's cost, volume and other attributes are calculated needs to be done both on the frontend (for speed) and on the backend (to validate). Backend is in Go and we can't practically run Go in the browser. So instead, I wrote the calculation snippets in JavaScript (which runs natively in the browser) and ran them on the backend on a JavaScript VM library written in Go [1].

[1]: https://github.com/robertkrimen/otto

Googling suggests https://github.com/robertkrimen/otto which allows scripting in javascript for golang projects. This would be definitely enough, but in some way it may be a bit overkill - and scripts supporter shall need some knowledge of javascript which is not always straightforward :)

It doesn't make sense to ask the user (aka me) to change the code every time I want to modify any web apps right? So I decided to split the webapps into two parts. WebApps are those only require basic permissions and do not interact with the host OS. They will be run inside a sandbox created using ECMA5 VM called Otto. The other type is called Subservice, in which it will need extra permission to interact with the OS and require higher level of access to the backend file system.

During my search for deploying Lambdas via GitHub actions, I came across a tutorial that utilized ncc for converting TypeScript and bundling. While ncc is effective, I discovered esbuild, which proved to be significantly faster and perfectly suited to my requirements.

The advent of esbuild, the native support for ES Modules in browsers, the widespread adoption of import map, the emergence of tools like Native Federation, and the Nx ecosystem all combine to forge a flexible and well-maintained Micro Frontend Architecture.

EsBuild is a relatively new, blazing-fast JavaScript bundler and minifier. It stands out for its high performance, significantly speeding up the build process in development pipelines.

Unlike Webpack, the Vite DevServer only compiles files when they are requested. It leverages ES module imports, which allow JS files to import other files without needing to bundle them together during development. When one file changes, only that file needs to be re-compiled, and the rest can remain unchanged. Project files are compiled with Rollup.js. Third-party dependencies in node_modules are pre-compiled using the ultra-fast esbuild bundler for maximum speed, and they are cached until the dependency version changes. Vite also provides a client script for hot module reloading.

Use esbuild to build the React code into a form executable on both the server and client sides.

The functions will bundle using esbuild. For that, it is required to install esbuild globally:

TSX is the newest and most improved version of our ts-node, using ESBuild to transpile TS files to JS very quickly. The most interesting part is that TSX was developed to be a complete replacement for Node, so you can actually use TSX as a TypeScript REPL, if you install it globally with npm i -g tsx, just run tsx in your terminal and you can write TSX natively. But what's even cooler is that you can load TSX for all TypeScript files using --loader tsx when you run your file. For example, let's say we have this file called index.ts:

esbuild plus Vite is out of developer preview and enabled by default, yielding 67%, 87%, 80% speed improvements for build time, hybrid build time and hybrid serve time respectively.

Bundling with esbuild

Besides Webpack, there are many other popular web bundlers available, such as Parcel, Esbuild, Rollup, and more. They all have their own unique features and strengths, and you should make your decision based on the needs and requirements of your specific project. Please refer to their official websites for details.