The TypeScript compiler is now implemented internally with modules

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  • TypeScript

    TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that compiles to clean JavaScript output.

  • There are two performance implications of "modularization": initialization-time and run-time.

    You are correct that initializing many modules is usually slower than initializing one module [1]. However, bundling puts all modules into one file, so this PR doesn't actually change anything here. Both before and after this PR, the TypeScript compiler will be published as a single file.

    At run-time, switching to ES modules from another JavaScript module system can be a significant performance improvement because it removes the overhead of communicating between them. Other module systems (e.g. TypeScript namespaces, CommonJS modules) use dynamic property accesses to reference identifiers in other modules while ES modules use static binding to reference the identifiers in other modules directly. Dynamic property access can be a big performance penalty in a large code base. Here's an example of the performance improvement that switching to ES modules alone can bring: https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/39247.

    [1] This is almost always true. A random exception to this is that some buggy compilers have O(n^2) behavior with respect to the number of certain kinds of symbols in a scope, so having too many of those symbols in a single scope can get really slow (and thus splitting your code into separate modules may actually improve initialization time). This issue is most severe in old versions of JavaScriptCore: https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/issues/478. When bundling, esbuild deliberately modifies the code to avoid the JavaScript features that cause this behavior.

  • sucrase

    Super-fast alternative to Babel for when you can target modern JS runtimes

  • Hi, Sucrase author here.

    To be clear, the benchmark in the README does not allow JIT warm-up. The Sucrase numbers would be better if it did. From testing just now (add `warmUp: true` to `benchmarkJest`), Sucrase is a little over 3x faster than swc if you allow warm-up, but it seemed unfair to disregard warm-up for the comparison in the README.

    It's certainly fair to debate whether 360k lines of code is a realistic codebase size for the benchmark; the higher-scale the test case, the better Sucrase looks.

    > worse it disables esbuild and swc's multi-threading

    At some point I'm hoping to update the README benchmark to run all tools in parallel, which should be more convincing despite the added variability: https://github.com/alangpierce/sucrase/issues/730 . In an ideal environment, the results are pretty much the same as a per-core benchmark, but I do expect that Node's parallelism overhead and the JIT warm-up cost across many cores would make Sucrase less competitive than the current numbers.

  • SurveyJS

    Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

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  • esbuild

    An extremely fast bundler for the web

  • There are two performance implications of "modularization": initialization-time and run-time.

    You are correct that initializing many modules is usually slower than initializing one module [1]. However, bundling puts all modules into one file, so this PR doesn't actually change anything here. Both before and after this PR, the TypeScript compiler will be published as a single file.

    At run-time, switching to ES modules from another JavaScript module system can be a significant performance improvement because it removes the overhead of communicating between them. Other module systems (e.g. TypeScript namespaces, CommonJS modules) use dynamic property accesses to reference identifiers in other modules while ES modules use static binding to reference the identifiers in other modules directly. Dynamic property access can be a big performance penalty in a large code base. Here's an example of the performance improvement that switching to ES modules alone can bring: https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/39247.

    [1] This is almost always true. A random exception to this is that some buggy compilers have O(n^2) behavior with respect to the number of certain kinds of symbols in a scope, so having too many of those symbols in a single scope can get really slow (and thus splitting your code into separate modules may actually improve initialization time). This issue is most severe in old versions of JavaScriptCore: https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/issues/478. When bundling, esbuild deliberately modifies the code to avoid the JavaScript features that cause this behavior.

  • jest

    Delightful JavaScript Testing.

  • [3] https://github.com/facebook/jest/issues/9430

  • modules

    Discontinued Node.js Modules Team

  • It is complicated but most user anger should be directed to node.js module group[1]. TS is forced to follow node.js standard.

    [1] https://github.com/nodejs/modules/issues/323

  • sucrase

    Super-fast alternative to Babel for when you can target modern JS runtimes (by chyzwar)

  • unpkg

    The CDN for everything on npm

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

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  • editorconfig-vim

    EditorConfig plugin for Vim

  • With a .editorconfig[1] file with the correct configs you can get most code editors to insert spaces instead of tabs.

    [1] https://editorconfig.org/

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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