Nice too that it's a compiled language, so you get the end tool in a nice static binary. As a non-Node dev, I hate the experience of hacking on some project and having to install a giant pool of NPM stuff just to run some minifier or linter. Hound is an example of this— the guts of the project are golang, but it has a frontend that uses webpack, jest, etc: https://github.com/hound-search/hound
Which is fine, I guess; definitely use the right tool for the job. And maybe Node developers hate finding my Python projects and needing to set up a virtualenv to run them in. But all the same, I approve a direction where more of this kind of tooling is available without a build-time Node dependency.
The bigger win here are projects that increasingly do more and do it faster. You can essentially replace babel’s hydra with typescript (single dependency) and do it faster too. TS also essentially supports “preset-env” via the target property (however you must pick the ES version, not a browser list)
The important part now is ensuring that these projects don’t just die and disappear like, say, Rich Harris’ “buble” tool (a very old “fast Babel alternative”)
Which is fine, I guess; definitely use the right tool for the job. And maybe Node developers hate finding my Python projects and needing to set up a virtualenv to run them in. But all the same, I approve a direction where more of this kind of tooling is available without a build-time Node dependency.