[fg137]

It's funny they bother to bring up the half dead "Google Closure Compiler" as an example.

And my dumb brain still don't understand how IR is "better" than AST after reading this post. Current AST based JS tools working reasonably well, and it's not clear to me how introducing this JSIR helps tool authors or downstream users, when there are all those roadblocks mentioned at the end.

[100ms]

Why is it half dead? They only jettisoned the ancient support library, the compiler itself AFAIK remains best in class and has commits on GitHub as of 15 hours ago

[fg137]

Something as important as https://github.com/google/closure-compiler/issues/2731 that is in ES2022 standard (Yes, released near 4 years ago) is still not implemented. Lots of new code don't compile with it.

It has become a liability in the build process and people are getting rid of it.