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by michaelmior 722 days ago
Personally, I appreciate knowing when something is written in Rust. I know it is very likely I can easily install it and try it out immediately and that it is likely faster than any non-native tool I'm currently using. However, I do find "based on Rust" instead of "written in Rust" to be an odd choice of terms.
1 comments
necovek 722 days ago
Just looking at their benchmarks, it's not particularly fast. es-build looks much better in benchmarks, but it's not written in Rust. It seems they wanted a tool in Rust just-because (experience on the team, preference foe the language...), and then only compared against those.

As for the language "based on Rust", it's likely bad wording due to them not being native English speakers.

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IshKebab 722 days ago
esbuild is written in Go, which has similar "probably quite fast and easy to install" properties to Rust.

Compare that to the expected experience if it was written in C++ or JavaScript or Python or Java or ... All of those are either likely to be slow or painful to use.

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nine_k 722 days ago
To be fair, you can package a modern Java app into a single executable [1], without the entire JRE shipped inside.

Few people do that though.

[1]: https://www.graalvm.org/latest/reference-manual/native-image...

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michaelmior 721 days ago
One of the reasons few people do that is because the build process becomes much more complicated. It's also much more complicated to do any sort of dynamic loading which is not terribly uncommon.
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pas 721 days ago
A native executable includes only ... the language runtime, and ...

How small is that compared to the JRE? Also I guess this means the program cannot load arbitrary classes?

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