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Oh, quite coincidentally, I just wrote a blog post about what I would dream of working on if I had more manpower available [0]. Short story is that Javascript t
by samhuk 4y ago
Oh, quite coincidentally, I just wrote a blog post about what I would dream of working on if I had more manpower available [0]. Short story is that Javascript tooling is sick. It has a pathology of slowness, bloatedness, dep hell, etc. Webpack is a great example. tsc another.
Although these tools are great, after all they have been critical in the development of the web, they are slow! Additionally, many lack good Typescript support for various reasons, so there's often guesswork involved, and there's more problems that would be too voluminous to get into.
So my dream software that I would create would be a collection of Go-centric Javascript tooling, essentially growing what esbuild started. I envisage an npm written in Go (imagine deps installed in 1 second rather than 30), hot reloading dev servers using esbuild all written in Go (imagine ~100ms hot reloading of an enterprise-grade website), SASS parsers written in Go, the whole JS toolchain rewritten in a fast compiled langauge.
Unfortunately, the web development community isn't yet ready for such. I personally believe it's the obvious future of web development, just like how it became silly to use anything other than compiled C libs for python development. I go into a bit more detail in my blog post :)
[0] https://samhuk.substack.com/p/what-im-working-on https://samhuk.substack.com/p/what-im-working-on
- unfunco 4y ago> Unfortunately, the web development community isn't yet ready for such. I think the web development community is already adopting this approach in a lot of places, except they're not limiting themselves to Go. Deno is written in Rust, a lot of Bun is written in Zig.
- samhuk 4y agoI was going to mention Bun and Deno. The crux of the issue/challenge is that there is so much to do. So incredibly much. JS tooling written in {not-JS} (i.e. Deno, Bun, esbuild, etc) needs developers to buy in to the new language and ecosystem, which has proven pretty much impossible. Just look at esbuild - as far as my search goes, it has not a single Golang plugin, yet >100 JS ones. My fear is that we will keep on getting tools like Bun, esbuild, etc., but the JS community never really embraces it and we are forever stuck in JS-zig or JS-Go or JS-{whatever} interop land for JS tooling.