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Skeptical of rewriting JavaScript tools in "faster" languages
I’ve written a lot of JavaScript. I like JavaScript. And more importantly, I’ve built up a set of skills in understanding, optimizing, and debugging JavaScript that I’m reluctant …
Now we’ve reached a saturation point where the API surface is mostly settled, and everyone just wants “the same thing, but faster.” Hence the explosion of new tools that are nearly drop-in replacements for existing ones: Rolldown for Rollup, Oxlint for ESLint, Biome for Prettier, etc. They could just be faster because 1) they’re being written with performance in mind, and 2) the API surface is already settled, so the authors don’t have to spend development time tinkering with the overall design. In Pinafore, I considered replacing the JavaScript-based blurhash library with a Rust (Wasm) version, before realizing that the performance difference was erased by the time we got to the fifth iteration.
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