The big innovation here seems to be https://swc.rs/
If it works as advertised this is going to be great for a ton of JS/TS projects. Particularly having a 20x typescript compiler boost when running large test suites would be great. Maintaining 5-8 different babel related projects in packages.json is also annoying and often buggy.
Looking forward to see where else this gets adopted and it's stability.
How does it compare to esbuild? Seems they both want to achieve exactly the same thing, but somehow it's two different efforts.
I’ve tried both; found that both definitely solve the performance issues that they’re intended to address; and decided that I just prefer using esbuild. As much as I appreciate Rust, the idea that Rust (swc) vs. Go (esbuild) would matter in this context doesn’t make sense to me. The switch to a compiled language is what’s night-and-day.
I wonder if it's the compiled code entirely or also the architecture. Babel has a notoriously flexible design with tons of extensions reaching in and messing with things.
I'd bet that you could probably get close to 2x the performance if you stripped it down to the same feature set (it would still be 2-3x slower, but a dramatic improvement).