ESTree compatible AST

[sosukesuzuki]

Describe the feature

Support ESTree compatible AST.

Some options:

• SWC output ESTree compatible AST directly.
• New tool like swc-to-estree

Babel plugin or link to the feature description

Nothing.

Additional context
Add any other context about the problem here.

I'm a maintainer of Prettier Code Formatter and I'm developing to use SWC as a parser for Prettier (Disclaimer: It is a 100% personal activity and not affiliated with any organization.) Prettier already has a code base to handle ESTree compatible ASTs well. So, if SWC supports ESTree, it will be easier. Also, ESTree is the de facto standard for JavaScript ASTs, and by supporting it, many other tools may be able to use SWC.

related: #1392

[sosukesuzuki]

@kdy1 What do you think about this?

[jdalton]

@sosukesuzuki Just a heads up, the parse APIs are being deprecated. But I've asked if there'll be a way to support this scenario in the future as I've seen some perf improvements on my end (replacing acorn with swc+ little AST adapters).

[kdy1]

I made a mistake. parse will be preserved to help some tools like ast explorer.

[sosukesuzuki]

Is it expected that third party libraries will only use the swc parser?

[kdy1]

No, but rust <-> js is very slow and it overwhelms time used for actual work.

[sosukesuzuki]

I see. Out of curiosity, you are doing integration SWC and Next.js at vercel? At there, how to integrate Rust land and JS land?

[kdy1]

Yes. We are working on it. We are going to reimplement all transforms in rust, and call transform() from js.

[sosukesuzuki]

I found https://github.com/vercel/next.js/tree/canary/packages/next/build/swc. It looks good, thanks

[sosukesuzuki]

@kdy1 (The main topic of this issue) What do you think about making swc's AST consistent with ESTree, which is the de facto standard?

[kdy1]

What's the advantage if I make it compatible with estree? Rust does not have GC, and estree-like ast will degrade performance.

[sosukesuzuki]

I did not know about the performance drawbacks. The advantage is that it is much easier for existing tools such as ESLint and Prettier to use swc as a parser.

[kdy1]

I see. But actually, passing ast to javascript from rust is very slow. Parser itself is fast, but json serialization/deserialization is the problematic part, and I'm not sure about the way to make it fast.
Maybe lazy accessors can be a solution, but I didn't try it.

[jdalton]

If you provide the string the user can do things like fast-json. This allows for them to choose which serializer (JSON.parse or otherwise) to use.

[kdy1]

@jdalton If it's fast enough, I think we can support babel plugins. So I think it is worth benchmarking.

[jdalton]

As a test of raw parse power I tried parsing babylon.max.js which s 10.6MB of JS.
It takes acorn ~700ms and swc ~2 seconds, so I can see what you mean about the Rust->JS transition.

[overlookmotel]

Please see #2175 if you're interested. I've done some experiments into speeding up parse().

[vjpr]

@jdalton (replacing acorn with swc + little AST adapters)

Could you share this code?