alt Hacker NewsWhy are they porting the Babel-isms? They should be using Oxc tooling directly, not hanging onto JavaScript parsers, IMHO -- isn't the benefit of porting to Rust that you can use fast native code?
It seems backwards that they are freezing the Babel AST into the interoperability contract and only using the more efficient native representations in an isolated fashion -- shouldn't it be the other way around?
OXC is not the only consumer, so using the OXC AST wouldn't particularly make sense? I thought it was pretty well explained in the PR:
> Note that the conversion from any AST into our HIR is complex, and we can only maintain one version. Hence we've aligned on using a Babel-like AST as our public API. Another key point is that we don't yet implement our own scope analysis (since the TS version of the compiler relied on Babel's scope analysis), so for now we require that the scope data be serialized. It's a denormalized graph, and some metadata has to be stored to associate nodes with scopes. We're open to feedback about the AST and scope representation - we iterated a bit just to get things to work, but it can be more optimal.