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Skeptical of rewriting JavaScript tools in "faster" languages

(nolanlawson.com)
160 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 20 Oct 24 21:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.197s | source
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anyfoo ◴[20 Oct 24 21:54 UTC] No.41898802[source]▶
> I’ve written a lot of JavaScript. I like JavaScript. And more importantly, I’ve built up a set of skills in understanding, optimizing, and debugging JavaScript that I’m reluctant to give up on.

It's not that hard to do the same for a less terrible language. Choose something markedly different, i.e. a low level language like rust, and you will learn a lot in the process. More so because now you can see and understand the programming world from two different vantage points. Plus, it never hurts to understand what's going on on a lower level, without an interpreter and eco-system abstracting things away so much. This can then feed back into your skills and understanding of JS.

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FridgeSeal ◴[20 Oct 24 21:56 UTC] No.41898815[source]▶
I swear some JS devs will go out of their way to avoid learning anything else, whilst simultaneously and breathlessly espousing that we rewrite everything else in JS.
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mardifoufs ◴[20 Oct 24 22:28 UTC] No.41899015[source]▶
It's usually the opposite. And the post is specifically about making JavaScript tools, why would you not expect them to be written in JS? I guess not making tools for say, c# devs in c# would also be bad?
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1. rbower ◴[21 Oct 24 00:30 UTC] No.41899672[source]▶
> It's usually the opposite. And the post is specifically about making JavaScript tools, why would you not expect them to be written in JS?

Take a look at rollup, vite, etc. These tools are essentially replacing webpack, which is written in JS. Modern Rollup (^4) uses SWC (Rust-based bundler), and vite is currently using a mix of esbuild (Go) and Rollup. I think they're switching to SWC in v6 though.

The point here is that for certain operations JS is not nearly as fast as lower-level languages like the aforementioned. Bundling is one of those performance-critical areas where every second counts.

That said, as a TypeScript developer I agree with the sentiment that JS tools should be written in JS, but this isn't a hard and fast rule. Sometimes performance matters more. I think the reasonable approach is to prefer JS – or TS, same difference – for writing JS tools. If that doesn't work, reach for something with more performance like Rust, Go, or C++. So far I've only had to do the latter for 2 use cases, one of which is hardware profiling.