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The JavaScript Oxidation Compiler

oxc.rs

51–60 of 147 posts

Re: The JavaScript Oxidation Compiler

#51
post #48
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Rust makes developers excited in a way that C/C++ just doesn't.

Yeah, it is as if there were never other compiled languages before to rewrite JavaScripting tooling.

The word 'excited' in GP's post isn't decorative.

Re: The JavaScript Oxidation Compiler

#52
post #3

All the Void Zero projects are super cool although I still wonder how they’re going to monetize all this.

[dead]

in the beginning yes, but VCs want to cash out eventually. Look at mongodb, redis and whatnot that did everything to get money at a certain point. For VCs open source is a vehicle to get relevant in a space you would never be relevant if you won't do open source.

Re: The JavaScript Oxidation Compiler

#53
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it is as if there were never other compiled languages before to rewrite JavaScripting tooling.

The word 'excited' in GP's post isn't decorative.

I am fully aware of it, there have been many 'excited' posts in HN history about various programming languages, with related rewrite X in Y, the remark still stands.

Re: The JavaScript Oxidation Compiler

#55
post #28

[dead]

Oxc is not the first Rust-based product on the market that handles JS, there is also SWC which is now reasonably mature. I maintain a reasonably large frontend project (in the 10s of thousands of components) and SWC has been our default for years. SWC has made sure that there is actually a very decent support for JS in the Rust ecosystem. I'd say my biggest concern is that the same engineers who use JS as their main…

It's not like JS isn't already implemented in a language that's a lot more similar to Rust anyhow though. When the browser or Node or whatever other runtime you're using is already in a different language out of necessity, is it really that weird for the tooling to also optimize for the out-of-the-box experience rather than people hacking on them?

Even as someone who writes Rust professionally, I also wouldn't necessarily expect every Rust engineer to be super comfortable jumping into the codebase of the compiler or linter or whatever to be able to hack on it easily because there's a lot of domain knowledge in compilers and interpreters and language tooling, and most people won't end up needing experience with implementing them. Honestly, I'd be pretty strongly against a project I work on switching to a custom fork of a linting tool because a teammate decided they wanted to add extra rules for it or something, so I don't see it as a huge loss that it might end up being something people will need to spend personal time on if they want to explore.

Re: The JavaScript Oxidation Compiler

#56
post #11

oxidation is a chemical process where a substance loses electrons, often by reacting with oxygen, causing it to change. What does it have to do with JavaScript?

Oxidation of iron produces rust. Rust is the language of implementation of that compiler, and of the entire Oxc suite.

But rust is named after a mushroom?

Re: The JavaScript Oxidation Compiler

#57
post #54

whats the point of writing rust memory safe for js if js is already memory safe, ant u just write it in js???

Too slow. Different people implemented linter, bundler, ts compiler in JS. That means three different parsers and ASTs, which is inefficient. These guys want a grand unified compiler to rule them all.

Re: The JavaScript Oxidation Compiler

#60
post #5
post #3

All the Void Zero projects are super cool although I still wonder how they’re going to monetize all this.

they are going to use vite plus for monetization

The vite plus idea is that you'll pay for visual tools. What's odd to me is it makes their paid product kind of a bet against their open product. If their open platform were as powerful as it should be, it would be easy to use it to recreate the kinds of experiences they propose to sell.

The paradox gains another layer when you consider that their whole mission is to build tools for the JavaScript ecosystem, yet by moving to Rust they are betting that JS-the-language is so broken that it cannot even host its own tools. And because JS is still a stronger language for building UIs in than Rust, their business strategy now makes them hard-committed to their bet that JS tools in JS are a dead end.

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