swc VS closure-compiler

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.

The most well-known tools that rely on JSDoc are Closure Compiler (not to be confused with the Closure programming language) and TypeScript. Both of these tools can help make your JavaScript typed, but they approach it differently. Closure Compiler primarily focuses on enhancing your .js files by adding typing through JSDoc annotations (after all, they are just comments), while TypeScript is designed for .ts files, introducing its own well-known TypeScript constructs such as type, interface, enum, namespace, and so on.

Closure Compiler follows the same line of thinking:

https://github.com/google/closure-compiler/wiki/FAQ#closure-...

I think only Google Closure Compiler did some optimizations based on its JSDoc-style annotations (see docs). If I remember correctly, types mostly allowed renaming objects' properties across modules, but most other advanced optimizations (like dead code elimination or functions inlining) didn't rely on types. In my experience properties renaming resulted in subtle, hard to discover bugs and I'd say they didn't bring much benefit.

The @template tag is supported by Google Closure Compiler

i'm not sure you want them to write back https://github.com/google/closure-compiler/pull/3958

time to fork

I just came across the Google Closure Compiler. As the documentation says, it does not create machine code, but rather, "compiles JavaScript to better JavaScript".