pax

Great idea, very much welcome in the fragmented JS community. However, I am sceptical about performance of a tool written in TypeScript/JavaScript. We've seen that tools written in compiled languages like Rust or Go can be much faster, e.g. https://swc-project.github.io/, https://packem.github.io/, https://github.com/nathan/pax, https://github.com/evanw/esbuild. On the other hand, Yarn is written in JS and it is considered fast enough. Facebook has a good track record for writing well designed tools.

I think ESbuild is more comparable with Pax [1] (or Pax + SWC) in the alternatives written in Rust. ESbuild mostly focuses on bundling for now, and does little in terms of source code transformation compared to SWC. [1] https://github.com/nathan/pax

I'm not sure why this would be desirable. Sure, bundlers are slow, but that's what projects like pax [1] are for. Bundlers create one single file instead of the browser having to download your entire possibly huge dependency tree. Sure, with HTTP/2.0 and the upcoming QUIC or HTTP/3.0 overhead of this is minimized, but it's still not zero. There is also a cognitive overhead of having to configure the server to push all the deps to clients otherwise you have constant back & forth where the client is fetching a file, then the server is answering, then the client is finding out it needs those other files, etc etc. Unless you are using global CDNs, expect latencies to be > 50ms for each such step, if not hundreds of ms, and this times the depth of your dependency graph. Bundlers also do dead code analysis. There are really two solutions to thi

There's also Pax [1], also written in Rust. Pax however is only a bundler, I don't think it actually transpiles code. [1] https://github.com/nathan/pax