Write a blog post announcing Embedded Sass (sass#607)

source/blog/032-embedded-sass-is-live.md

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+---
+title: "Embedded Sass is Live"
+author: Natalie Weizenbaum
+date: 2022-02-01 2:00 PST
+---
+
+After several years of planning and development, I'm excited to finally announce
+the stable release of Embedded Dart Sass along with its first official wrapper,
+the [`sass-embedded`] package available now on npm!
+
+[`sass-embedded`]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/sass-embedded
+
+Embedded Sass is an ongoing effort to make a highly-performant Sass library
+available to as many different languages as possible, starting with Node.js.
+Although Node.js already has access to the pure-JS `sass` package, the nature of
+JavaScript inherently limits how quickly this package can process large Sass
+files especially in asynchronous mode. We expect `sass-embedded` to be a major
+boon to developers for whom compilation speed is a concern, particularly the
+remaining users of `node-sass` for whom performance has been a major reason to
+avoid Dart Sass.
+
+The `sass-embedded` package fully supports the [new JS API] as well as the
+[legacy API] other than a few cosmetic options. You can use it as a drop-in
+replacement for the `sass` package, and it should work with all the same build
+plugins and libraries. Note that `sass-embedded` is a bit faster in
+*asynchronous* mode than it is in synchronous mode (whereas the `sass` package
+was faster in synchronous mode). For substantial Sass files, running
+`sass-embedded` in either mode will generally be much faster than `sass`.
+
+[new JS API]: https://sass-lang.com/documentation/js-api#usage
+[legacy API]: https://sass-lang.com/documentation/js-api#legacy-api
+
+In order to limit the confusion about which version of which package supports
+which feature, the `sass-embedded` package will always have the same version as
+the `sass` package. When new features are added to the JS API, they'll be
+supported at the same time in both packages, and when new language features are
+added to Sass they'll always be included in a new `sass-embedded` release
+straight away.
+
+## How it Works
+
+Embedded Sass is composed of three parts:
+
+1. [The compiler], a Dart executable that wraps Dart Sass and does the actual
+   heavy lifting of parsing and compiling the files. Dart native executables are
+   generally much faster than JavaScript, so using them for the
+   computationally-intensive work of stylesheet evaluation is where Embedded
+   Sass gets its speed.
+
+2. [The host], a library in any language (in this case JavaScript) that provides a
+   usable end-user API for invoking the compiler. The host provides callers with
+   configuration options, including the ability to define custom importers and
+   Sass functions that are used by the compilation.
+
+3. [The protocol], a [protocol-buffer]-based specification of how the host and
+   the compiler communicate with one another. This communication happens over
+   the standard input and output streams of the compiler executable, which is
+   invoked by the host to perform each compilation.
+
+[The compiler]: https://github.com/sass/dart-sass-embedded
+[The host]: https://github.com/sass/embedded-host-node
+[The protocol]: https://github.com/sass/embedded-protocol
+[protocol-buffer]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Buffers
+
+## Other Languages
+
+Embedded Sass was designed in part as a way for languages other than JavaScript
+to have access to the full power of Sass compilation with custom importers and
+functions, similarly to how C++ wrappers for [LibSass] worked in the past. We
+hope that community members will use this protocol to implement embedded hosts
+for many other popular frontend languages. If you end up doing so, message us
+[on Twitter] or [Gitter] and we'll link it on this site!
+
+[LibSass]: https://sass-lang.com/libsass
+[on Twitter]: https://twitter.com/SassCSS
+[Gitter]: https://gitter.im/sass/sass