3 ms·

What’s the catch? Do they really have a secret sauce or are there limitations in esbuild to achieve these speed ups?

by qeternity 5y ago

hsn915 5y ago
The catch is the person behind it cares about performance
JeanMeche 5y ago
Well not being written in JS does help -a lot-. Esbuild is written in GO.
- qeternity 5y ago
  I'm sure it helps. It doesn't help 100x
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - 1_player 5y ago
    It helps to get 80% of the way there, on a logarithmic scale. The remaining 20% is evanw saying no to adding any kind of option, feature and the kitchen sink to this project, which is one of the reason Webpack/Babel & co. are some of the heaviest objects in the universe.
nusaru 5y ago
Some section titles from the FAQ[1]: > Why is esbuild fast? > - It's written in Go and compiles to native code. > - Parallelism is used heavily. > - Everything in esbuild is written from scratch. > - Memory is used efficiently. > Production readiness > - Used by other projects > - API stability > - Only one main developer > - Not always open to scope expansion 1: https://esbuild.github.io/faq/ https://esbuild.github.io/faq/
- qeternity 5y ago
  I saw that, but none of that adds up to a 100x speedup.
  - dbbk 5y ago
    It does
johnnypangs 5y ago
The catch is that they focus on modern builds (I.e. not IE) it also doesn’t do type definitions, so if you want type defs you’ll need to compile with typescript anyway.
pedrow 5y ago
It doesn't always work in situations where 'require' can't be statically evaluated at run-time (webpack would work in this situation) - for example I filed a bug recently[0] Even though the bug was closed I was impressed with the thorough and timely response from the esbuild developers which explained the reasoning behind it. For me it was worth changing my project just so I could continue using esbuild, it really is that good! [0]: https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/issues/1619 https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/issues/1619

What’s the catch? Do they really have a secret sauce or are there limitations in esbuild to achieve these speed ups?

hsn915 5y ago

The catch is the person behind it cares about performance

JeanMeche 5y ago

Well not being written in JS does help -a lot-. Esbuild is written in GO.

qeternity 5y ago
I'm sure it helps. It doesn't help 100x
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 1_player 5y ago
  It helps to get 80% of the way there, on a logarithmic scale. The remaining 20% is evanw saying no to adding any kind of option, feature and the kitchen sink to this project, which is one of the reason Webpack/Babel & co. are some of the heaviest objects in the universe.

nusaru 5y ago

Some section titles from the FAQ[1]: > Why is esbuild fast? > - It's written in Go and compiles to native code. > - Parallelism is used heavily. > - Everything in esbuild is written from scratch. > - Memory is used efficiently. > Production readiness > - Used by other projects > - API stability > - Only one main developer > - Not always open to scope expansion 1: https://esbuild.github.io/faq/ https://esbuild.github.io/faq/

qeternity 5y ago
I saw that, but none of that adds up to a 100x speedup.
- dbbk 5y ago
  It does

johnnypangs 5y ago

The catch is that they focus on modern builds (I.e. not IE) it also doesn’t do type definitions, so if you want type defs you’ll need to compile with typescript anyway.

pedrow 5y ago

It doesn't always work in situations where 'require' can't be statically evaluated at run-time (webpack would work in this situation) - for example I filed a bug recently[0] Even though the bug was closed I was impressed with the thorough and timely response from the esbuild developers which explained the reasoning behind it. For me it was worth changing my project just so I could continue using esbuild, it really is that good! [0]: https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/issues/1619 https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/issues/1619