Rustacean Station

SWC with DongYoon Kang

7 snips
May 31, 2025
Guest
DongYoon Kang
DongYoon Kang, the creator of SWC and lead maintainer of this Rust-based platform, dives into the evolution of SWC and its adoption by tools like Next.js and Deno. He shares insights on optimizing JavaScript processing, which has led to significant performance gains—31% improvements with new algorithms! The discussion expands into community contributions and the complexities of maintaining modular plugins. Future plans include exploring Dart support, ensuring SWC remains a crucial asset for web developers worldwide.
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ANECDOTE

SWC Genesis and Motivation

  • DongYoon Kang created SWC to replace Babel due to long compile times frustrating his web development experience.
  • He implemented it entirely in Rust to enable parallel execution and faster processing unlike Babel in JavaScript.
ANECDOTE

User Adoption Drives Development

  • The main motivation for DongYoon Kang to keep working on SWC has been its growing user adoption by projects like Deno and Next.js.
  • Moving to Vercel and seeing real-world usage fuels his ongoing excitement and commitment.
ANECDOTE

Learning Rust Through Practice

  • DongYoon Kang learned Rust by reading "The Rust Programming Language" book and practicing with small libraries.
  • He ported Babel's JS parsing to Rust by trial and error without prior parser experience, which turned out successful.
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