serialviz VS swc

For my simple app, one-line calls to ESBuild in package.json seem good enough. I run everything using 'npm run dev' or 'npm run build'. See [1].

I suppose it wouldn't scale if the app got too big and complicated.

[1] https://github.com/skybrian/serialviz/blob/main/package.json

Nice! Looks like the protocol between the Pico and the Windows software is quite simple. Porting it to another OS shouldn't too hard.

Here's an unusual approach to portability for this kind of software: since Chrome supports Web Serial, a web app could do the UI and then it would be portable across operating systems (though still Chromium specific) with no software to install (assuming you already have Chrome or Edge).

Along those lines, I wrote a little web app that plots CSV data from a microcontroller board (which happens to be a Pico). There's not a lot to it, but I like it better than the Arduino plotter and it might be useful as an example:

https://github.com/skybrian/serialviz

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.