> Much of the whole babel/webpack/react/ts stuff would be just a bunch of macros instead of idiosyncratic build tools and so on. And we would have had much less compatibility churn.
Wouldn't that just trade compatibility churn against running the transpilers on client side in javascript, making it even slower to execute? Moving this part of the execution on the developer side seems like a good choice to me.
You can write macros that are very declarative but generate very hairy code that you wouldn’t necessarily write by hand. The result might be much more machine optimized.
Sure, you pay some upfront cost for expansion, but generally speaking macros don’t hinder you to write fast code, they just give you more options and trade offs.
Wouldn't that just trade compatibility churn against running the transpilers on client side in javascript, making it even slower to execute? Moving this part of the execution on the developer side seems like a good choice to me.