Skeptical of rewriting JavaScript tools in "faster" languages

Sometimes it seems that people who write these kinds of pieces forget that not everyone in the world does web or even web-adjacent work, and node.js is something we don’t even consider to be part of our ecosystem. Rewriting useful things in non-JS has the benefit of letting folks like me who avoid JS like the plague use useful tools. Stop assuming everyone wants to get anywhere near the JS ecosystem: I’ve gone 30 years without touching it, and plan to continue that streak. Rewriting stuff is great from my perspective.

> Stop assuming everyone wants to get anywhere near the JS ecosystem

I have been dragged, through straight misrepresentation, into the Node.js world.

OMG, awful hardly begins to touch it.

I have not used Go, but as far as I can tell every thing the Node.js people do is done better in Go.

I do not recommend Rust. I have a lot of experience with Rust, and unless you actually need the real time responsiveness it will bog you down.

> Stop assuming everyone wants to get anywhere near the JS ecosystem

The author is writing about JS ecosystem tools.

I can partly understand the poster above: Some people (including me) for example want and have to use JavaScript, but simply don't want to get dragged into that whole node.js/npm ecosystem for various reasons.

I avoid any tool which forces me to pull in a gazillion npm packages, while I gladly use esbuild for example because it looks and feels like a nice little compact tool.

I feel the same way about python, but I don’t blame python authors for using the python ecosystem to write python tools when I am forced to use a little python. I consider python to be an essential part of any build system since it’s used in so many places, as much as I don’t like it.

Maybe the problem people have is that node/npm are becoming a similarly “essential” build system piece much like python. That much I can certainly understand.