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I saw, I just don't understand the rationale for picking Babel over OXC or something else as the interchange format -- other than "we were already doing it this
by LoganDark 5mo ago
I saw, I just don't understand the rationale for picking Babel over OXC or something else as the interchange format -- other than "we were already doing it this way". After all, you know what they say about temporary solutions.
- molf 5mo agoSo isn't not changing more sensible than changing to an arbitrary alternative? The current developers surely are more familiar with the Babel representation than OXC, so why switch?
- LoganDark 5mo agoWhat I mean is, if you're going to rewrite it in Rust, why rewrite Babel rather than leaning on the existing ecosystem? I know they're not actually rewriting Babel, just reusing the semantic layout of its AST, but it's feeling a bit like the MediaWiki parser situation to me (roughly "if we started from scratch today, we wouldn't choose to have it this way, but we started a different way before, and it's been a difficult path to get to where we want to be"). Maybe that's a fairly remote analogy but it feels similar.
- swiftcoder 5mo ago> if we started from scratch today, we wouldn't choose to have it this way, but we started a different way before, and it's been a difficult path to get to where we want to be" This is just how software development for a large public project goes. If you want to land big changes in a finite amount of time, you take the path that breaks the least number of things along the way. Once the whole ecosystem is rust-based, they can always trim out some of the redundant intermediate representations for performance gains.