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And yet developers working on front-end code to run in those browsers are waiting seconds for their linter or test suite or transpiler to process a few thousand

And yet developers working on front-end code to run in those browsers are waiting seconds for their linter or test suite or transpiler to process a few thousand lines of JS code, on a modern PC. Not a few million lines, a few thousand. That is orders of magnitude slower than it should be, and it's a cost that hits huge numbers of developers many times every day. Quite often, that awful performance is because the slow tools are written in a certain language also used in those "fast" browsers, and far too many developers are still giving this a pass because they incorrectly assume some magical runtime and JIT will make up for using a language that was never designed for high performance work and writing large, complicated programs.

pwdisswordfish8 6y ago
The problem with the NPM ecosystem is really dire because know-nothing programmers who write JS plug in to that ecosystem and write bad code, and then the know-nothing programmers who don't write JS come along, too, and say look how bad JS is. JS is plenty fast and can be used for "large, complicated programs"[1] just fine. The problem with most JS written today is in programmer practices—the way that the community associated with NodeJS pushes one other to write code (which is, ironically, not even a good fit for the JavaScript language). It turns out that how you write code actually matters (which is the central point of the article here to begin with...) 1. https://web.archive.org/web/20070127104743/http://www.spreadfirefox.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070127104743/http://www.spread...