xgboost-node VS swc

This chips away at one of the showstoppers for Deno for me, which is good.

But while "the vast majority" of npm packages don't require a gyp build step for native addons, some of those modules are pretty important, and I see no indication in the announcement that they're also going to be implementing the Node C API or the gyp build process.

Right now I'm working with a machine learning project, and XGBoost [0] is a direct Node.js extension [1] through the binary interface.

So this does bring things a step closer to being generally usable, but there are still significant roadblocks.

A WebAssembly build of XGBoost could work with Deno, but aside from some guy's unsupported side project/proof-of-concept for use in a browser, I'm not seeing an XGBoost WebAssembly build. And generally when deploying something like a machine learning model I'd rather use well-supported tools than to need to dive into the rabbit hole of maintaining my own.

And yes, XGBoost will likely eventually have that kind of support for Deno, but then the next bleeding-edge project will come along and only support Node.

Even assuming Deno eventually hits a tipping point in popularity where everyone wants to release Node _and_ Deno support in their bleeding-edge projects, there are still things that I miss from package.json that don't seem to exist in the Deno ecosystem.

Things like the "scripts" block: A nice centralized place to find all of the things that need to be done to a project, plus auto-run script entries that can trigger when a project is installed. And inheritable, overridable dependency maps (see the yarn "resolutions" block).

I'd love to jump into Deno, but I think there has been far too much "baby thrown out with the bathwater" to its design. It's the classic development problem of looking at a system and seeing a ton of complexity, but not really understanding that all of that complexity was there for a reason. Maybe when it re-evolves 80% of Node's and npm's features I'll be convinced to make the jump. I'm a huge TypeScript fan after all. But it still strikes me as a violation of "As simple as possible, but no simpler."

[0] XGBoost is a _very_ promising approach to machine learning, training models much faster and with much more accuracy than traditional approaches.

[1] https://github.com/nuanio/xgboost-node

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.