Sucrase = 20x faster build times than Babel?

[canadaduane]

I just noticed a rollup plugin called @rollup/plugin-sucrase and like most node ecosystem things, I was like, "Hey, another project I haven't heard about. Let's check it out."

It turns out Sucrase is a fork of Babel that makes the following interesting and snowpacky assumption:

Sucrase is an alternative to Babel that allows super-fast development builds. Instead of compiling a large range of JS features to be able to work in Internet Explorer, Sucrase assumes that you're developing with a recent browser or recent Node.js version, so it focuses on compiling non-standard language extensions: JSX, TypeScript, and Flow. Because of this smaller scope, Sucrase can get away with an architecture that is much more performant but less extensible and maintainable.

Has it been considered as part of the compiling step of snowpack?

[FredKSchott]

Sucrase is an interesting project, but we don't actually use babel inside of Snowpack! We use esbuild, which is written in Go, compiled to WASM, and probably significantly faster than even Sucrase.

Some of our plugins like @snowpack/plugin-webpack may use Babel internally, but their goal is to compile your code to older browsers to run in production, which would be closer to Babel by comparison.

[evanw]

We use esbuild, which is written in Go, compiled to WASM, and probably significantly faster than even Sucrase.

Actually esbuild has both native and WASM versions. If you're using the WASM version for Snowpack then you'll almost certainly want to switch to the native version, which is significantly faster (e.g. it's multi-threaded while WASM is single-threaded).

[FredKSchott]

👍 Great, that's good to know. We're already using esbuild (native) but I'd incorrectly assumed it was wasm under the hood