rehype VS swc

Add Remark and Rehype plugins

Astro content collection are as simple as a folder containing a bunch of Markdown (or Markdoc or MDX) files if that's the only thing you need, but they can also do relationship matching between different collections, frontmatter validation using zod and you can also customize how the markdown is parsed and translated to html using rehype and remark and their plugin ecosystem.

That's all to render the post as HTML, there are lots of things you can do to customize the results, you can check the remark plugins and rehype plugins to pass as props to and you can also take a look at some other bloggers if you're looking for different styles for example Lee Robinson's or if you liked mine.

Now we have our Cloudinary account set up, we can use it with Docusaurus. To do so, we need to create a rehype plugin. This is a plugin for the rehype HTML processor. It's a plugin that will transform the HTML image syntax into a Cloudinary URL.

The next idea was to use normal markdown images and to place the images in the public folder. This eliminates the need for static import and treats our image like a remote image. But in order to make this work, we have to tell next/image the dimensions of the image. If we would use a static import for the image, the import magic would provide the dimensions for us. To pass the width and height to the image component we use a rehype plugin called rehype-img-size.

Astro makes it easy to add Remark or Rehype plugins to your markdown. You can extend add a markdown property to the Astro config file, an add a function/plugin to the remarkPlugins property (the extendDefaultPlugins property is added to make sure the default plugins aren't overwritten by this config change):

rehype: "rehype is a tool that transforms HTML with plugins. These plugins can inspect and change the HTML. You can use rehype on the server, the client, CLIs, deno, etc."

This means that you can transform your HTML with tools like rehype or remark. You can find out more about the available options here.

The HTML syntax tree is transformed through rehype, and rendered to React components.

First, we switched the default compiler for new projects from Babel to SWC (Speedy Web Compiler). SWC is dramatically faster than Babel and requires zero configuration. We’ll continue to support Babel in any project currently using it.

SWC

As the reference explains “**SWC** (Speedy Web Compiler) is an extensible Rust-based platform that can be used for both compilation and bundling. Using SWC with Nest CLI is a great and simple way to significantly speed up your development process.”

This is specifically about breaking the myth that performing expensive self-contained operations (e.g, parsing GraphQL) in a native extension (C, Rust, etc.) is always faster than the interpreted language.

The JS ecosystem has the same problem, people think rewriting everything in Rust will be a magic fix. In practice, there's always the problem highlighted in the post (transitioning is expensive, causes optimization bailouts), as well as the cost of actually getting the results back into Node-land. This is why SWC abandoned the JS API for writing plugins - constantly bouncing back and forth while traversing AST nodes was even slower than Babel (e.g https://github.com/swc-project/swc/issues/1392#issuecomment-...)

Why Speedy Web Compiler ?

FTA is a TypeScript static analysis tool built on the speedy foundations of swc. FTA is fast; capable of analyzing more than 150 files per second on typical hardware, it offers a powerful addition to your code quality toolkit.

Very cool! I'm curious, is this intended for dev tooling?

For example, I could see this (or something similar) being useful as the engine for a typescript language server that would be faster than the standard one

But if it's not aimed at 1:1 with tsc, would it be intended more for something like swc[1]?

Or what would you expect people to use this for, besides just being a cool project to learn from?

[1] https://github.com/swc-project/swc

This is... good news, but I still cannot fathom using the default Typescript compiler for regular development. Seriously, leave the type-checking to your IDE and CICD chain, and switch to using tsx (https://www.npmjs.com/package/tsx) or swc (https://swc.rs/) and you will _immediately_ notice the difference in speed and productivity.