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Comment by rk06 | Hacker News Reader

> they are betting that JS-the-language is so broken that it cannot even host its own tools.

Evan wallace proved it by building esbuild. this is no longer bet.

> If their open platform were as powerful as it should be, it would be easy to use it to recreate the kinds of experiences they propose to sell.

you would be surprised to know that tech companies may find it cheaper to pay money than developer bandwidth for stuff beyong their core compentency.

dropbox was also considered to be trivially implementable, but end users rarely try to re-invent it.

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> esbuild

Another example is the TypeScript compiler being rewritten in Go instead of self-hosting. It's an admission that the language is not performant enough, and more, it can never be enough for building its own tooling. It might be that the tooling situation is the problem, not the language itself, though. I do see hopeful signs that JavaScript ecosystem is continuing to evolve, like the recent release of MicroQuickJS by Bellard, or Bun which is fast(er) and really fun to use.

I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, though. JavaScript isn't performant enough for its own tooling, but that's just one class of program that can be written. There are plenty of other classes of program where JavaScript is perfectly fast enough, and the ease of e.g. writing plugins or having a fast feedback loop outweighs the benefits of other languages.

I quite like Roc's philosophy here: https://www.roc-lang.org/faq#self-hosted-compiler. The developers of the language want to build a language that has a high performance compiler, but they don't want to build a language that one would use to build a high performance compiler (because that imposes a whole bunch of constraints when it comes to things like handling memory). In my head, JavaScript is very similar. If you need a high performance compiler, maybe look elsewhere? If you need the sort of fast development loop you can get by having a high performance compiler, then JS is just the right thing.

True, I agree. It's a good thing to accept a language's limitations and areas of suitability, without any judgement about whether the language is good for all purposes - which is likely not a good goal for a language to have anyway. I like that example of Roc, how it's explicitly planned to be not self-hosting. It makes sense to use different languages to suit the context, as all tools have particular strengths and weaknesses.

Off topic but I wonder if this applies to human languages, whether some are more suited for particular purposes - like German to express rigorous scientific thinking with compound words created just-in-time; Spanish for romantic lyrical situations; or Chinese for dense ideographs. People say languages can expand or limit not only what you can express but what you can think. That's certainly true of programming languages.

Which also proves the point that not everything needs to be Rust.

I agree and foresee a future, maybe a decade from now, when the trend shifts to everyone rewriting all the Rust written or generated in the meantime to something else, a newer hopefully simpler language that accomplishes the same thing.

Just wait when Zig reaches 1.0

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