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Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

rome.tools

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Re: Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

#81

Post by m463 »

ruffrey wrote: post #9
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?…

Healthy skepticism is good. Dev tools are hard. There are hundreds of open source companies - many making gobs of money. Not all - many fail. This team has name recognition and a few successful projects already - Babel and yarn. I can see it working out. JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages. Millions of developers. With solid execution, there are monstrous markets here.

> Dev tools are hard.

That's true. The market is small and price-sensitive.

Re: Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

#82

Post by proxyon »

I'm a senior eng in Typescript at a tech company. I will always advocate against adopting this project. Jamie is a perfect example of the toxic attitudes and activism destroying OSS and tech. Lerna or Babel are fine, but then again, they are purely OSS projects, not companies expressly designed to enrich him and reward his toxic activism.

Re: Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

#83

Post by legostormtroopr »

amasad wrote: post #10
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?…

It's not a "JavaScript library" it's an entire toolchain. In the same way that `git` generated billions of dollars worth of value in the form of companies and productivity, Rome will do the same. Possibly even bigger.

Who is getting rich off "git"?

GitHub, yeah absolutely, but git makes no money because noone pays for git.

Likewise, noone pays for command line package managers (in fact I doubt anyone pays for a command-line tool at all). So its ok to say it generates value, but if you can't caputre that value its not a sound business model.

Re: Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

#84

Post by PleaseIgnacio »

proxyon wrote: post #82

I'm a senior eng in Typescript at a tech company. I will always advocate against adopting this project. Jamie is a perfect example of the toxic attitudes and activism destroying OSS and tech. Lerna or Babel are fine, but then again, they are purely OSS projects, not companies expressly designed to enrich him and reward his toxic activism.

What kind of activism are you referring to?

Re: Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

#85

Post by proxyon »

PleaseIgnacio wrote: post #84
proxyon wrote: post #82

I'm a senior eng in Typescript at a tech company. I will always advocate against adopting this project. Jamie is a perfect example of the toxic attitudes and activism destroying OSS and tech. Lerna or Babel are fine, but then again, they are purely OSS projects, not companies expressly designed to enrich him and reward his toxic activism.

What kind of activism are you referring to?

He's well known for almost torpedoing Lerna by committing an insane proprietary license where he called ICE and Palantir fascists who aren't allowed to use Lerna, and included into that any companies who ever do work for ICE or Palantir, which included Microsoft. Microsoft in response had to get to work dropping Lerna from all of its repositories, but instead managed to convince a different maintainer to boot Jamie off the Lerna team. While he was doing all of this he had the gall to call Babel and Lerna HIS personal projects. He wrote stuff like (paraphrasing) "I will not allow Palantir to use my projects." Multiple other maintainers of these projects had to point out to him that these were, literally, not his projects. At the time that he did this he wasn't even the maintainer or core contributor to Lerna. Long story short I will never support anything this guy does. It is incredibly irresponsible to put him anywhere near the levers of power of any significant project or to give him power over employees in a company.

Re: Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

#86

Post by vijaybritto »

pictur wrote: post #76
betterfaster wrote: post #75

I think the future of JavaScript tooling is esbuild and SWC, written in fast compiled languages like Go and Rust. I don't see the value proposition in a brand new toolchain written in slow and memory hungry TypeScript/JavaScript.

you are right but the most common tools are still made with these. I think people don't worry about performance that much. or worry, but they don't make an effort to change that.

You're correct on this to some extent. Teams in our company are so fed up with webpack for local development that they are willing to skip some features it provides to use vitejs.dev for local dev. We fully couldnt avoid webpack 5 because Module federation is very very valuable.

Re: Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

#87

Post by vijaybritto »

cpojer wrote: post #2

The JavaScript tooling ecosystem is fragmented, bloated and slow. Rome is the best - and currently only - bet to fix this. I’m excited!

How will Rome be faster than the other tools when its also written in Typescript? I see that unification will be an advantage but I dont think it will be faster than others. Especially when native code/wasm based tools are already available. (esbuild/swc/rslint)

The positives I see are: - No fighting with different versions of different tools when upgrading - Simpler configurations

But I dont see any other reasons to convince people to use Rome.

Re: Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

#88

Post by jeroenhd »

serverholic wrote: post #72
jeroenhd wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the relevancy of rust here, but you're right that at this point any language that compiles directly to machine code will blow any javascript tool out of the water any time. Of course, perf is only one reason to use a tool, I expect javascript based tooling to stick around for much longer because developers are used to them now. And, of course, if all you know is frontend, everything starts to look like a…

I'd prefer my tools to use languages that are compiled + memory safe. Basically that just leaves rust or go. But rust also has other features that can help prevent bugs regarding concurrency and more. So rust is a feature in my book and not just an implementation detail.

I agree, but there's still plenty of alternatives. Pre-compiling languages like C# and Java will already provide a speed bonus, and with stuff like GraalVM's native images and Kotlin native you can squeeze even more performance out of these GC'd languages.

At this point in time, improvement comes from "anything faster than node". Hell, you might even manage to get a performance benefit out of PHP with the way things are right now.

Re: Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

#89

Post by leodriesch »

capableweb wrote: post #32

Where is the company incorporated? In most countries, companies act for profits first. Especially if you raise funding from a few selected ones instead of the wider community. This statement reads weird too > We don’t believe in placing artificial constraints on the tool or having functionality behind a paywall. In order to support the open source project, we’ll be building supplemental products and services. This al…

Sebastian actually tried fundraising, but I think the campaign got stuck at about 36k of the 100k goal. https://rome.tools/funding/

VC money is just on another level, although as you said it comes with its own difficulties.

Re: Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

#90

Post by greshario »

no_wizard wrote: post #80
greshario wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> License: MIT. Virtually all open source projects in the web dev community are MIT licensed, especially when it comes tooling. Choosing any other license would cause a lot of friction and prevent adoption.

Isn't Apache-2.0 also considered easy going?

Yeah, I think they are pretty much identical. I should have said choosing any more restrictive license would cause problems.
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