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by molf 6 days ago
OXC is not the only consumer, so using the OXC AST wouldn't particularly make sense? I thought it was pretty well explained in the PR:

> Note that the conversion from any AST into our HIR is complex, and we can only maintain one version. Hence we've aligned on using a Babel-like AST as our public API. Another key point is that we don't yet implement our own scope analysis (since the TS version of the compiler relied on Babel's scope analysis), so for now we require that the scope data be serialized. It's a denormalized graph, and some metadata has to be stored to associate nodes with scopes. We're open to feedback about the AST and scope representation - we iterated a bit just to get things to work, but it can be more optimal.
1 comments
LoganDark 6 days ago
I saw, I just don't understand the rationale for picking Babel over OXC or something else as the interchange format -- other than "we were already doing it this way". After all, you know what they say about temporary solutions.
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molf 6 days ago
So isn't not changing more sensible than changing to an arbitrary alternative?

The current developers surely are more familiar with the Babel representation than OXC, so why switch?

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LoganDark 6 days ago
What I mean is, if you're going to rewrite it in Rust, why rewrite Babel rather than leaning on the existing ecosystem? I know they're not actually rewriting Babel, just reusing the semantic layout of its AST, but it's feeling a bit like the MediaWiki parser situation to me (roughly "if we started from scratch today, we wouldn't choose to have it this way, but we started a different way before, and it's been a difficult path to get to where we want to be"). Maybe that's a fairly remote analogy but it feels similar.
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swiftcoder 6 days ago
> if we started from scratch today, we wouldn't choose to have it this way, but we started a different way before, and it's been a difficult path to get to where we want to be"

This is just how software development for a large public project goes. If you want to land big changes in a finite amount of time, you take the path that breaks the least number of things along the way.

Once the whole ecosystem is rust-based, they can always trim out some of the redundant intermediate representations for performance gains.

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