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> Elm is the fastest compiler I've ever seen Compared to the other languages you mention there, I'm not surprised that Elm has the fastest compiler; compiling
by saghm 5y ago
> Elm is the fastest compiler I've ever seen
Compared to the other languages you mention there, I'm not surprised that Elm has the fastest compiler; compiling to an actual binary (or something low-level like JVM bytecode) definitely seems like it would take more work to compile to than something much higher level like JavaScript, especially if you're performing optimizations at each intermediate layer. That's not to knock Elm though; obviously having a fast compile time is a good thing regardless of the reason, and it certainly still would be possible for someone to accidentally write a slow compiler to JavaScript!
- pharmakom 5y agoCompiling to binary can be plenty fast, especially JVM code. It’s optimisation that really takes time.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoIn a modern stack though, compiling a JS or Typescript project takes ages; I don't believe it's the rewriting, optimizing and minification per se, but more the huge amounts of code and files that need to be processed.
- kaba0 5y agoElm is fast because it does only the subset of Haskell’s feature set. It doesn’t have as strong a type system, it uses eager evaluation and I guess it mostly falls back on the JS runtime for optimizations.