[dfabulich]

So, what's your counterproposal?

Each of these tools provides real value.

* Bundlers drastically improve runtime performance, but it's tricky to figure out what to bundle where and how.

* Linting tools and type-safety checkers detect bugs before they happen, but they can be arbitrarily complex, and benefit from type annotations. (TypeScript won the type-annotation war in the marketplace against other competing type annotations, including Meta's Flow and Google's Closure Compiler.)

* Code formatters automatically ensure consistent formatting.

* Package installers are really important and a hugely complex problem in a performance-sensitive and security-sensitive area. (Managing dependency conflicts/diamonds, caching, platform-specific builds…)

As long as developers benefit from using bundlers, linters, type checkers, code formatters, and package installers, and as long as it's possible to make these tools faster and/or better, someone's going to try.

And here you are, incredulous that anyone thinks this is OK…? Because we should just … not use these tools? Not make them faster? Not improve their DX? Standardize on one and then staunchly refuse to improve it…?

[conartist6]

I'm being a little coy because I do have a very detailed proposal.

In want the JS toolchain to stay written in JS but I want to unify the design and architecture of all those tools you mentioned so that they can all use a common syntax tree format and so can share data, e.g. between the linter and the formatter or the bundler and the type checker.

[notnullorvoid]

Yeah it's a shame that few people realize running 3 (or more) different programs that have separate parsing and AST is the bigger problem.

[nicoburns]

Hasn't that already been tried (10+ years ago) with projects like https://github.com/jquery/esprima ? Which have since seen usage dramatically reduced for performance reasons.

[9dev]

You can rip fast builds from my cold, dead hands. I’m not looking back to JS-only tooling, and I was there since the gulp days.