vike VS swc

Here are some collected notes of the distinctions between SSRx, Vinxi and Vike, to share with anyone else searching the web. Since my Google search came up empty, and I had to ask around on Twitter/X and GitHub to find out.

We're working on exactly this. You can already do this with Triplit but it's challenging to make an out of the box solution because each framework passes context/data different from server to client differently. There's a cool project called [Vike](https://github.com/vikejs/vike) that generalizes this pattern across SSR'd UI frameworks

Anyone have experience with https://github.com/vikejs/vike?

have you seen https://vite-plugin-ssr.com/ ? i've only browsed their docs, but AFAICT their pitch that it's a more DIY approach to a framework, where you keep a lot of control over how things are wired together.

I agree and, as the author of vite-plugin-ssr[1], that's what I recommend to my users: go for static whenever you can.

I think it's something every web developer should be aware of. Static is indeed a lot simpler than dynamic.

I've wrote more about it over here[2] (SSG = static, SSR = dynamic).

[1]: https://vite-plugin-ssr.com

Maybe vite-plugin-ssr? It's pretty unopinionated and doesn't get in your way.

Also have a look at https://vite-plugin-ssr.com/ (author here).

VPS is slightly lower level which gives you a lot more control: integrate with your existing Node.js backend (use any backend framework you want), deploy anywhere, use any React alternative (Solid, Preact, ...) and any data fetching tool (e.g. Relay can't really be used with Next.js).

The flip side is that you've to write a little bit more glue code. Although this will be alleviated by a lot with projects such as Bati[0], Stem[1], and vike-react (see Vike Rebranding[2]).

VPS also cares a ton about details, such as hooks for full control over i18n (use any i18n strategy you want), better Base URL support (VPS supports setting a different base for your server and your CDN), automatic deploy synchronisation, domain-driven file structure, polished and helpful error messages (especially the next upcoming release), ...

Detailed comparison with Next.js: [3].

If you run into any blocker then it's quickly fixed (or at least a workaround is proposed).

It supports not only SSR and pre-rendering, but also SPA in case you don't need SSR. It's going to support RSC but doesn't yet (RSC isn't ready for production).

Because it's lower level and because it's decoupled from React everything is designed in an agnostic way and with meticulous care. In other words: vite-plugin-ssr is becoming a robust foundation. There are breaking changes coming for the v1 release but beyond that chances are that there won't be any breaking change for years in a row.

In a nutshell: vite-plugin-ssr takes care of the frontend and only the frontend. You keep control over your architecture. (Whereas frameworks tend to put themselves right in the middle of your architecture restricting you in fundemetanl ways.)

Last but not least: it's powered by Vite which means blazing fast HMR.

[0] https://batijs.github.io

[1] https://stemjs.com/

[2] https://github.com/brillout/vite-plugin-ssr/issues/736

[3] https://vite-plugin-ssr.com/nextjs-comparison

Now by default, Vite doesn't do SSR. One way to do Vite+SSR is to use vite-plugin-ssr. You can scaffold an example project that does SSR based on some dynamic data:

vite-plugin-ssr

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.