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Thanks for sharing, I'm very interested in how his ideas might help us understand open source as well! Actually just posted a few chats recently on Illich, the last one speaking on this and related essays. https://hopeinsource.com/illich, https://hopeinsource.com/silence

> "a commons is a space which is established by custom. It can not be regulated by law. The law would never be able to give sufficient details to regulate a commons."


Thanks, Henry.

I have been very much enjoying working through your podcast episodes since discovering it.


Thanks for sharing @andy_adams! Henry here, happy to chat with y'all (Victor and Tony) if you'd want


Yep there's been various PRs for perf over the years but it's never been a focus per-se, and we've had help from various people including the v8 team https://twitter.com/left_pad/status/927554660508028929. Haha yeah no one wants to hear about open source sustainability in a thread about asking that tools be correct/fast/easy to use at the same time :D

It's true, speed is not really a concern on my mind at the moment - rather that we have enough people even willing to contribute back at all


Trust me, I am well aware that even big open source projects don’t get the resourcing they deserve. Everyone always has to make do. Babel is a fantastic project.


haha oops I totally wasn't looking at who I commenting with, definitely agree! Thanks!


No oops required! I should have been more careful in my initial phrasing. I certainly don’t want to imply that you should be doing even more work!


Yeah I've had a difficult time figuring out how this was tested:

I would recommend using the benchmark at https://github.com/v8/web-tooling-benchmark in the future if it's currently not possible since currently it only seems to be testing ES5 (jquery.min.js) for the parser and a short ES6 snippet for the transforms.


(I think when you say "tested" you mean "benchmarked" – your comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18746905 gave a nice link to how it is tested).


If you can use test262's test suite you should be good, it looks like they are referring to Babel's tests for some of the features? example https://github.com/swc-project/swc/pull/86, I just checked really quick though.

In terms of perf, I'm sure rust will be much faster than JS. And this project's main goal is to be a faster version than Babel. I would suggest the perf test would be different though because it's testing code I would consider not to be representative of what Babel actually runs on. Example with the transform test: https://github.com/swc-project/swc/blob/222bdc191fcab7714319... it's a very small file with minimal transforms even necessary at all. And the parser test is for all minified js files, none of which are written in ES6+ https://github.com/swc-project/swc/blob/master/ecmascript/pa.... Currently it's not really testing ES6+, just how at a baseline it's much faster to process a ES5 file, so it's possible that it might be even faster.

edit: I will note that Babel does a lot more than what this project is doing currently (plugins, other proposals, ts/flow, sourcemaps, etc) but this is more about what could be so if people are willing to more on this effort in the long run (with funding/support/people) it could be super useful! I'm curious about how that will work when our project has such a struggle with contributors and Babel itself is written in JS. (I work on Babel :D)


We certaintly have PRs around perf https://github.com/babel/babel/labels/area%3A%20perf but we don't have explicit benchmarking for it, and have had work from v8 team and others https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/924349334346276864?s=20.


Henry here, didn't expect this post to ever be on HN heh!

The podcast is a 10 episode series (pre-recorded it over the last 5 months) with my friend Nadia (who isn't religious)

I'm writing up a post about making it from scratch (never made a podcast before) and will post it soon as well!


Hey Henry, cool concept for a podcast. I'm also a Christian who started with commercial development and now is pushing more for open source (even got permission to open-source some of my employer's backend tech as a "20% project", which'll be exciting to release when it's ready).

Religiously, growing up in an evangelical setting, I didn't see that as a very effective way of reaching people (as you say, you're not going to convince people via argument), but I do believe in evangelism through actions. My close coworkers know my faith because they've noticed things and asked questions and I explained. And I find I take this stance with open-source as well. Talking about open-source being great is one thing, but actually putting it into practice is something else.

I'll definitely be listening to and sharing your podcast.


I also really liked the follow up on the three virtues, in the 2nd State of the Onion (http://www.wall.org/~larry/onion/onion.html)

> Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.

> These are virtues of passion. They are not, however, virtues of community. The virtues of community sound like their opposites: diligence, patience, and humility.

> They're not really opposites, because you can do them all at the same time. It's another matter of perspective. These are the virtues that have brought us this far. These are the virtues that will carry our community into the future, if we do not abandon them.


If dependencies are an issue, I would like to make another package that just bundles it all into 1 package (reuse `babel`) so there aren't any "deps" to install but haven't gotten around to doing it, would be a useful contribution opportunity for someone though.


thanks for posting! I personally usually just use https://babeljs.io/repl/build/master!


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