NInicoburns·Feb 18, 2026
Hasn't that already been tried (10+ years ago) with projects like https://github.com/jquery/esprima ? Which have since seen usage dramatically reduced for performance reasons.
In Fastest Front End Tooling for Humans and AIjquery
esprima
TypeScript2017–2026
jquery / esprima
esprima
ECMAScript parsing infrastructure for multipurpose analysis
4Distinct people
4Mentions
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7.1KGitHub stars
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What it is
ECMAScript parsing infrastructure for multipurpose analysis
GitHub
Where it is used
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.
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HN mentions by year4 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2017-09-26 13:03:35 UTC to 2026-02-18 22:43:45 UTC.
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Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
4 sourcesThe thread was originally about CRA vs Vite size on disk (or implicitly, if we're applying it to real world applications, network cost in CI job startup times). And like I said, surrogate pairs don't apply to ASCII.
See this[0] for reference. Note how the first byte must fall within a certain range in order to signal being a surrogate pair. This range quite deliberately falls outside the ASCII range. This fact is taken advantage of by JS parsers to make parsing of ASCII substrings faster by special casing that range, since checking for a valid character in the entire unicode range is quite a bit more expensive[1].
IMHO nitpicking about memory consumption of the underlying data structure is a bit meaningless, since the spec doesn't actually enforce any guarantees about memory layout. An implementation can take more memory for pointer to pr
Read the rest
ototype, to cache hash code/length, etc, and there are also considerations such as whether the underlying data structure is polymorphic or monomorphic due to JIT, whether the string is boxed/unboxed, whether it's implemented in terms of C strings vs slices, etc.
Regardless, it doesn't change the fact that the octet sequence "hello world" takes 11 bytes in ASCII/UTF8 encoding (disregarding implementation metadata).
[0] https://github.com/jquery/esprima/blob/0911ad869928fd218371b...
[1] https://github.com/jquery/esprima/blob/0911ad869928fd218371b...
One of the stated goals on their Spidermonkey replacement issue (N.B. it still won't fix the view server protocol performance, but at least it'll be a modern engine) is "Get my C skills back out of the closet", and will require https://github.com/jquery/esprima.
It's depressing.
In What Sucks About Erlang (2008)Acorn has a plugin system:
https://github.com/ternjs/acorn#plugins
But as far as I know Esprima does not:
https://github.com/jquery/esprima/issues/1168
I have no idea about Cherow...
In Fast ECMAScript Parser – Alternative to Acorn / Esprima