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by saghm 1749 days ago
> Elm is the fastest compiler I've ever seen

Compared to the other languages you mention there, I'm not surprised that Elm has the fastest compiler; compiling to an actual binary (or something low-level like JVM bytecode) definitely seems like it would take more work to compile to than something much higher level like JavaScript, especially if you're performing optimizations at each intermediate layer. That's not to knock Elm though; obviously having a fast compile time is a good thing regardless of the reason, and it certainly still would be possible for someone to accidentally write a slow compiler to JavaScript!
3 comments
Cthulhu_ 1749 days ago
In a modern stack though, compiling a JS or Typescript project takes ages; I don't believe it's the rewriting, optimizing and minification per se, but more the huge amounts of code and files that need to be processed.
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kaba0 1747 days ago
Elm is fast because it does only the subset of Haskell’s feature set. It doesn’t have as strong a type system, it uses eager evaluation and I guess it mostly falls back on the JS runtime for optimizations.
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pharmakom 1749 days ago
Compiling to binary can be plenty fast, especially JVM code. It’s optimisation that really takes time.
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