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esbuild is written in Go, which has similar "probably quite fast and easy to install" properties to Rust.

Compare that to the expected experience if it was written in C++ or JavaScript or Python or Java or ... All of those are either likely to be slow or painful to use.



To be fair, you can package a modern Java app into a single executable [1], without the entire JRE shipped inside.

Few people do that though.

[1]: https://www.graalvm.org/latest/reference-manual/native-image...


One of the reasons few people do that is because the build process becomes much more complicated. It's also much more complicated to do any sort of dynamic loading which is not terribly uncommon.


A native executable includes only ... the language runtime, and ...

How small is that compared to the JRE? Also I guess this means the program cannot load arbitrary classes?




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