> Seems like O(n) to me? Yep, it's very much O(n). Even if you only consider incremental compilation it's O(n), where n is the number of lines in the file bein

> Seems like O(n) to me? Yep, it's very much O(n). Even if you only consider incremental compilation it's O(n), where n is the number of lines in the file being compiled. That being said, I understand the feeling of it being sort of O(1) from an incremental compilation perspective. For most of the JS build ecosystem, changing a file can result in many, many files getting recompiled due to bundling. So if you ignore that the size of the file isn't constant, it seems kind-of-O(1) for incremental compilation: for any file change in your codebase, only a single file gets recompiled, regardless of the size or dependency structure of the codebase. And as a result it should be much faster than the rest of the JS ecosystem for incremental compilation, since typically individual files don't get to be that large, and other incremental build systems may have to compile many files for a line change. But yeah, from a CompSci perspective, it's O(n), even for incremental builds: as the number of lines of the file grows, the amount of work grows. And for non-incremental builds it's of course O(n). > So you can open a socket in 50ms? Seems disingenuous to imply anything takes 50ms when really you’re just waiting until the first request to do anything. This makes a lot more sense in the context of the rest of the JS ecosystem. Of course, what Snowpack is doing is opening a socket, and opening a socket in 50ms isn't particularly impressive (mostly it's just measuring the overhead of starting a Node process and importing various dependencies). But other JS ecosystem build tools are very slow to start, because they're architected differently than Snowpack: they do full builds of the entire codebase (due to bundling) — or at least typically builds of large swaths of the codebase — and so on startup typically they'll immediately start building because doing it just-in-time is slow, which makes them slow to start. And if they don't start building immediately, the first request they service is typically quite slow. Since Snowpack doesn't bundle files, it's able to only build the files a specific page uses, which is typically much faster than building the entire codebase; as a result, they can do on-demand builds when a specific page is requested instead of relying on precompilation. The 50ms isn't impressive in terms of "look how fast we opened a socket." It's impressive in terms of "look how quickly you can start loading pages to see results as compared to other systems," because their build system is so fast that they don't need to precompile.