prepack VS realworld

Hello HN,

I'm considering the development of a new programming language, drawing inspiration from Rust's strengths, with a focus on compiling to JavaScript. Here what I'm considering are some key features:

Strict Type System

Algebraic Data Types

*Unsafe Mode for JS/TS Interaction*: Facilitate direct interaction with existing JavaScript and TypeScript code.

No Null Usage: Option/Result patterns to avoid null.

Trait Implementation

Backend Development Priority: Initially targeting server-side applications.

Efficient Compiler Design: Including features like dead-code elimination and partial evaluation, similar to the approach of Prepack[0] (by Facebook).

I believe this approach could bring significant benefits, especially with recent advancements like Uint8Array and worker threads.

Would this be of interest to the community? Looking forward to your insights and discussion.

[0] https://github.com/facebookarchive/prepack

You can still do optimisations based purely on Javascript semantics. This is similar to the first example you give with dead function elimination, and many minifiers do some amount of this already, but you can take it to some extremes. One example of this is the (no longer maintained) Prepack project from Facebook. The core idea is to evaluate as much Javascript as possible at compile time, with the expectation that the result will probably be smaller (albeit less human readable) than the initial code.

It's no longer maintained, but I think prepack is roughly what you're looking for.

i've had code where it intentionally relied on the wrong behavior (missing hook dependencies) and when I fixed it it caused an unintentional bug (hook fired too often or sometimes infinite rerendering). Yes it is more of a bug in the code rather than React hooks issue but it is also really hard to fix/rewrite. while i'd love to jump on the hype train projects like https://github.com/facebookarchive/prepack and how concurrent mode is still experimental after five+ years doesn't give me a lot of confidence.

Some real examples in JavaScript can be seen on Prepack[2]. Consequently it is natural to wonder whether we can AOT compile components of client side frameworks, to achieve a reduction in the final bundle size, but also to increase application execution speed.

Less or more it’s likely to happen, and could have been expected 2-3 years ago.

Especially with https://github.com/facebook/prepack. They want to eventually ship pre-compiled components rather than React.createElement() to end user

https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/7324

I also think this is why facebook had been investing in `prepack` - https://github.com/facebook/prepack

To illustrate my concerns, let's take the "Real World Example" that was made by the official Svelte Team in the official repository (https://github.com/sveltejs/realworld).

I often end up looking at https://github.com/sveltejs/realworld when I want to check how SvelteKit apps are "supposed" to be built. It's maintained by the Svelte team so you can learn good practices there.

I was looking at this a couple of hours ago and took a look at the realworld app app. I found all the fetch is done through the api, which is always called from server side. Even for user interaction, they always use forms to send the requests through the server.

I was looking at the realworld example and noticed that to login, they send a POST request to auth/login. auth/login then puts the data in an user object and sends it to an external API.

I'm pretty sure fetch is available for endpoints in latest version of svelte kit (older versions of svelte kit need to use node-fetch, updated svelte real world app has removed it as a dependency) but it's not working for me. Overview of my project files is below:

I’d recommend to take example from real world Svelte https://github.com/sveltejs/realworld