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swc-project
swc
Rust2018–2025
swc-project / swc

swc

Rust-based platform for the Web

Web DevelopmentLanguages & Compilers
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
50Distinct people
50Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
34.2KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Rust-based platform for the Web

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

Slightly tangential, but I can't tell if I love or hate the logo for swc https://github.com/swc-project/swc Either way, I want to try this next time I'm using TypeScript.

dj_gitmo used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year50 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-11-10 20:18:20 UTC to 2025-09-16 12:14:36 UTC.

051015202018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 3 submissions, 1 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 0 submissions, 10 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 18 mentions; 2 submissions, 16 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 1 submissions, 8 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC431
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC10010
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC18216
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC918
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Make the web (development) faster. SWC (stands for Speedy Web Compiler) is a super-fast TypeScript / JavaScript compiler written in Rust. It's a library for Rust and JavaScript at the same time. If you are using SWC from Rust, see rustdoc and for most users, your entry point for using the library will be parser. Also, SWC tries to ensure that If you select the latest version of each crates, it will work for rust users. MSRV of crates is currently 1.73. To update all SWC crates you use, you can run curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/swc-project/swc/main/scripts/update-all-swc-crates.sh | bash -s. This script will update all dependencies to the latest version and run cargo build to ensure that everything works. Note that you need jq cargo upgrade command to run the script. Supported Node Versions: Node v10+ for usage Node v20+ for development If you are using SWC from JavaScript, please refer to docs on the website. Documentation Check out the documentation in the website. Native npm packages use self-loading compressed addons on x64 and arm64 macOS, Windows MSVC, and Linux GNU/musl. The first load materializes the verified original addon; package names and JavaScript APIs stay the same. See native addon carriers for the supported-target boundary and SWC_NATIVE_BINDING_CACHE. Features Please see comparison with babel. Performance Please see benchmark results on the website. Supporting development Supporting swc Star History Powered by Sponsors SWC is a community-driven project, and is maintained by a group of volunteers. If you'd like to help support the future of the project, please consider: Giving developer time on the project. (Message us on Discord (preferred) or Github discussions for guidance!) Giving funds by becoming a sponsor (see https://opencollective.com/swc)! Contributing See CONTRIBUTING.md. You may also find the architecture documentation useful (ARCHITECTURE.md). License SWC is primarily distributed under the terms of the Apache License (Version 2.0). See LICENSE for details.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

50 sources
homebrewer·Sep 16, 2025
When the left-pad debacle happened, one commenter here said of a well known npm maintainer something to the effect of that he's an "author of 600 npm packages, and 1200 lines of JavaScript". Not much has changed since then. The best counter-example I know is esbuild, which is a fully featured bundler/minifier/etc that has zero external dependencies except for the Go stdlib + one package maintained by the Go project itself: https://www.npmjs.com/package/esbuild?activeTab=dependencies https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/blob/755da31752d759f1ea70b8... Other "next generation" projects are trading one problematic ecosystem for another. When you study dependency chains of e.g. biomejs and swc, it looks pretty good: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@biomejs/biome/v/latest?active... https://www.npmjs.com/package/@swc/types?activeTab=dependenc... Replac
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ing the tire fire of eslint (and its hundreds to low thousands of dependencies) with zero of them! Very encouraging, until you find the Rust source: https://github.com/biomejs/biome/blob/a0039fd5457d0df18242fe... https://github.com/swc-project/swc/blob/6c54969d69551f516032... I think as these projects gain more momentum, we will see similar things cropping up in the cargo ecosystem. Does anyone know of other major projects written in as strict a style as esbuild?
In Shai-Hulud malware attack: Tinycolor and over 40 NPM packages compromised
rs186·May 9, 2025
I once wanted to contribute to the popular swc project (https://github.com/swc-project/swc). I cloned the repo, ran build, and a whooping 20GB was gone from my disk. The parser itself (https://github.com/swc-project/swc/blob/main/crates/swc_ecma...) has over a dozen dependencies, including serde. Meanwhile, the heaviest JavaScript parser implemented in JavaScript is more lightweight. I decided that I should leave this project alone and spend my time elsewhere.
In Rust’s dependencies are starting to worry me
throwitaway1123·Sep 26, 2024
> Look at the dependency tree for a next Looks ok to me: https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=next Ironically, most of the dependencies are actually Rust crates used by swc and turbopack [1][2]. Try running `cargo tree` on either of those crates, it's enlightening to say the least. And of course, Node has a built in file watcher, and even the most popular third party package for file watching (Chokidar) has a single dependency [3]. [1] https://github.com/vercel/next.js/blob/07a55e03a31b16da1d085... [2] https://github.com/swc-project/swc/blob/b94a0e1fd2b900b05c5f... [3] https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=chokidar
In Rewriting Rust
rty32·Jun 22, 2024
Want to understand this as well. I was looking at using Rust for some static analysis of JavaScript files recently. My impression is that despite there being multiple parsers written in Rust -- the ones in swc, rslint and maybe others -- they are not as production ready as something like acorn, in terms of passing test262, features, documentation, and simply the amount of example code out there. There are bugs like https://github.com/swc-project/swc/issues/2038 that haven't been fixed after a few years. (I am aware that swc is "production-ready" in the sense that it is already used by Next.js, but that's not a high bar if you look at all the fallbacks and limitations) These projects also seem to be very broad but don't have enough developers to support them. They are aiming to provide an "all-in-one" solution with the parser, transpiler,
Read the rest
bundler etc all in one place. Which means they have perhaps too much work to do. While in the current JavaScript ecosystem, there are many projects for each part of the toolchain, the unexpected upside is that there are many people working on one thing to make it really good. Just look at webpack. It's not the best thing out there, but the sheer amount of features and the support for almost every use case is amazing. For parsers, acorn is very good, because the author can focus on the parser instead of also working on the bundler. As an end user, I would much rather see effort concentrated to make the toolchain really good to make it more production ready, rather than seeing another tool popping up.
In Farm: Fast vite compatible build tool written in Rust
wonnage·Sep 9, 2023
This is specifically about breaking the myth that performing expensive self-contained operations (e.g, parsing GraphQL) in a native extension (C, Rust, etc.) is always faster than the interpreted language. The JS ecosystem has the same problem, people think rewriting everything in Rust will be a magic fix. In practice, there's always the problem highlighted in the post (transitioning is expensive, causes optimization bailouts), as well as the cost of actually getting the results back into Node-land. This is why SWC abandoned the JS API for writing plugins - constantly bouncing back and forth while traversing AST nodes was even slower than Babel (e.g https://github.com/swc-project/swc/issues/1392#issuecomment-...)
In JIT-optimized Ruby can outperform a C extension
pcthrowaway·Jun 7, 2023
Very cool! I'm curious, is this intended for dev tooling? For example, I could see this (or something similar) being useful as the engine for a typescript language server that would be faster than the standard one But if it's not aimed at 1:1 with tsc, would it be intended more for something like swc[1]? Or what would you expect people to use this for, besides just being a cool project to learn from? [1] https://github.com/swc-project/swc
In Show HN: Ezno, a TypeScript checker written in Rust, is now open source
lioeters·Apr 15, 2022
If I understand correctly.. SWC is not a "TypeScript type-checker project", it's a bundler and compiler. The type checker in the title refers to the author's work porting the TypeScript compiler tsc to Go, which is a different/additional project. > Vercel is sponsoring and funding the work to port tsc to Go. We’re planning to open-source this work in the future. I’ll also be creating a bridge to use this new version of tsc with SWC. From the author's blog post "I'm porting tsc to Go" - https://kdy1.dev/posts/2022/1/tsc-go The author has gone back and forth on whether the work will be open-sourced. > It will be developed as a propriety software. Mar 2021 - https://github.com/swc-project/swc/issues/571#issuecomment-8... > I'm considering withdrawing the plan for open-sourcing it. Apr 2022 - https://github.com/swc-project/swc/issues/571#issu
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ecomment-1...
In Rust-based TypeScript type-checker project leader threatens paid solution

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