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Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

rome.tools

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Re: Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

#61

Post by lhorie »

blocked_again wrote: post #5

> Together, we’re announcing that we’ve raised $4.5 million in seed funding, led by A.Capital Ventures and OSS Capital. VCs fund startups which has the potential to 100x their returns right? How is that going to work here? How will they monetize a javascript library? Will we have an IPO for a javascript library? Or are they betting on a big tech company to acquire a Javascript library for 100s of millions of dollars?…

Over at r/javascript, Sebastian mentioned the business model would be based on providing services. He mentioned things like code quality monitoring and remote cache, so it sounds like it's up the alley of CI/CD cloud platform offerings.

Does seem like quite a departure from the original premise of Rome, but it seems like a sensible strategy. FWIW many companies easily spend 6-7 figures on CI/CD per year, so there's definitely room to carve out a niche there.

Re: Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

#62

Post by nytgop77 »

jakeva wrote: post #35
ehutch79 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

git doesn't make linus torvalds money though. People used git because it was mandated for linux kernel work.

To your second point, I remember when git was announced. I remember it was such a breath of conceptual fresh air over what I had been using (svn, mercurial) for me. I use it because it makes a lot more sense to me and how I work, and I've never worked on the linux kernel.

never used it, but afaik mercurial is basically git's doppelgannger - functionally they are identical. Am I wrong here?

Re: Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

#63

Post by lhorie »

orta wrote: post #37
tsdlts wrote: post #25

After using esbuild and experiencing fast builds, I'll never go back to tools written in javascript/typescript again.

FWIW, sucrase (written in TypeScript) has done a great job of being in the same ordinal of perf as esbuild: https://github.com/alangpierce/sucrase#sucrase

Sucrase "cheats" though[0]:

> Sucrase bypasses most of these steps, and works like this: Tokenize the input source code into a token stream using a trimmed-down fork of the Babel parser. This fork does not produce a full AST, but still produces meaningful token metadata specifically designed for the later transforms.

While this is fine for simple transformations like transpiling JSX, it's not very suitable for full-on AST analysis like some eslint plugins do. Most notoriously, Sucrase is specifically designed to be garbage-in-garbage-out, whereas Babel will throw proper errors on things like early errors.

Tools written in lower level languages like esbuild can take advantage of facilities that aren't well supported in Node, such as cheap concurrent coroutines and greater control over memory layout (Babel ASTs are notoriously megamorphic and can silently fall off perf cliffs depending on how you manipulate them). These caveats are not reflected in Sucrase's benchmark.

[0] https://github.com/alangpierce/sucrase#motivation

Re: Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

#64

Post by arthurcolle »

nytgop77 wrote: post #62
jakeva wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To your second point, I remember when git was announced. I remember it was such a breath of conceptual fresh air over what I had been using (svn, mercurial) for me. I use it because it makes a lot more sense to me and how I work, and I've never worked on the linux kernel.

never used it, but afaik mercurial is basically git's doppelgannger - functionally they are identical. Am I wrong here?

No, doppelganger seems like a pretty incorrect term to choose here.

http://www.rockstarprogrammer.org/post/2008/apr/06/differenc...

Re: Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

#65

Post by intergalplan »

valyagolev wrote: post #43
devit wrote: post #42

Being written in TypeScript and not Rust seems quite a big liability that might see Rome never be popular or lose out quickly due to inferior performance. There is already RSLint and SWC as JavaScript tools written in Rust and I would expect such tools to take over, with a good choice of it happening before Rome is ready.

no, much worse. they might actually win by overspending on marketing and feature-bloat, and we’ll be stuck working with slow tools

Yeah, I'm over here going, "oof, I hope they don't do too well by burning VC cash, or they might stifle esbuild and deno and similar efforts, and we'll remain stuck at this embarrassingly-low local maximum even longer"

Re: Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

#67

Post by yuchi »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #36
anaclet0 wrote: post #34

I thought Rome was a Facebook internal project. Am I missing something here?

It's also a java framework for parsing RSS and Atom. I bet that there are more ways that lead to Rome :-)

Parent comment was talking about this specific Rome project. And he is indeed right, it was a Facebook project at the earliest stage, but moved out of it when Seb left FB.

Re: Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

#68

Post by valyagolev »

intergalplan wrote: post #65
valyagolev wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, much worse. they might actually win by overspending on marketing and feature-bloat, and we’ll be stuck working with slow tools

Yeah, I'm over here going, "oof, I hope they don't do too well by burning VC cash, or they might stifle esbuild and deno and similar efforts, and we'll remain stuck at this embarrassingly-low local maximum even longer"

what else would VC money be for other than a sweet vendor lock-in?

Re: Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

#69

Post by abc11283 »

sebastianmck wrote: post #47
abc11283 wrote: post #19

Disclaimer: I know the foundation of Rome was largely written by Sebastian. This question still applies to Rome though, but more so to “open source companies” in general. https://rome.tools/credits/ How many of these people are going to receive an employment opportunity from this company? How many will receive equity? I suppose the same questions can be asked if any big project, like React, though that had FB’s backi…

I've been keeping the core contributor team updated on the funding process since December. We've also been publicly speaking about it in the Rome Discord server too. I posted about securing funding in early April in #general. Emanuele and Yasser both approached us during this period to offer their interest in joining and have stayed actively involved in development. It's a good question around how to compensate the s…

I appreciate the thoughtful reply. I should’ve added that I’ve seen your commitment to transparency through the whole process, so the info about Discord doesn’t really come as a surprise. Thanks and good luck!
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