Bazel can even skip the final artefact!

well for test runs you kinda need the binary to run, but you're correct, if the job is just "does this build" no download necessary.

Most PRs only touch a handful of targets so cache hits are extremely high in practice.

Depends on which targets and how granular the caching is. - if you touch package.json that might invalidate everything - touch core and you'll invalidate everything - touch one file in api and you may run all api tests (see gazelle)

I ran an experiment where I migrated a package to bazel then replayed a weeks worth of changes and it saved 20%. That's nothing to scoff at, but not the headline numbers you see after a full hot build.

If runtime performance is the goal it’s easier to port the required libraries to another language at this point.

I'd certainly like to see more of this, yes. It would be great if scipy, numpy, pytorch, etc. would be available universally, if only because you'd use the same function names in every language.

And if LLMs are as great as they make us believe they are, then this should be easily possible.

So rather than provide a runtime or compiler optimization, we force the programmer to do it by hand. This is why I don’t like Python philosophically.

I don't believe Python had a compiler in 2006...

Python has always had a bytecode compiler that did some minor optimizations, since its inception in the 90's. The issue is that optimizations are very hard to do correctly in the compiler because Python is so dynamic. Any piece of code could suddenly redefine mytype.__add__() and so forth.

Python 2.0 was released in October 2000. Maybe you're thinking of Python 3.0.

It had a runtime

This API may turn out to be manipulating humans via email.

Or just paying them. If they have access to resources, they have access to things of monetary value. Paying people will be vastly more powerful than it is even now when people's options of gainful employment keep dwindling.

Robot army controlled by AI is scary. Even more scary is robot _and_ human army controlled by AI.

If you like building but have no capital you might release something like this that works.

Students? The couldn’t even write the essay!

Most students can write an essay - but most are also smart enough to try to save time too haha

It’s harder and less lucrative than short social media spots.

What’s wrong with node? Genuine question

Nothing. Bun is just smaller and faster and comes with a built-in package manager, test runner, bundler, SQL engine, image processor etc..

It's 1/2 baked in everything it tries to do.

You need a "separate" tool called npm to install packages. It's dead slow so they added corepack. Another extra tool. Then you use it to install yarn or pnpm. Another extra tool. It might still be slower than bun...

In the past you need to transpile typescript with other tools. It can only run js out of the box. The later fix was a wasm build, which means slower than it could be. Another 1/2 job.

Many more examples in many areas but anything Node tries to do itself feels 1/2 baked.

Bun and Deno are faster than Node because it is a 1/2 job at its core. It has v8. It has the tools. It could be done but no. It did nothing for years until Deno and Bun came on the scene to nudge it.

So JavaScript in general.

I think npm install can be very very slow on large projects. Think minutes.

Use pnpm or yarn, also available with node.

From the perspective of someone trying to package nodejs, building it is a complete dumpster fire. GYP (generate your projects) is a now defunct and poorly thought out build tool that node heavily relies on with it's native C/C++ modules. Cross compiling is completely broken and I am honestly surprised it builds reliability for the native target.

C++ addons are great, that is what makes JavaScript on the server bearable, when performance matters and we're stuck with it, instead of using Go, Rust, Java, .NET.

It’s easier to imagine a super power than the end of capitalism, apparently.

It's famously easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.