swc as a javascript parser

Feature request

Follow up of https://github.com/webpack/webpack/discussions/13408#discussioncomment-760254

I’m author of the swc project and I’m looking for way to improve the performance of webpack.

Parsing something in javascript is a very expensive task, so I think using the parser of swc with libuv worker thread will improve performance a lot. (Also, it does not block js thread, so other codes can run while parsing.)

But currently, webpack does not allow overriding dependency analysis and it seems like I have to reimplement the whole JavascriptPlugin. If there’s an easier way to improve performance, it would be great.

I’ll create a standalone parser package if required.

What is the expected behavior?

Returning dependency graph from a loader.

What is motivation or use case for adding/changing the behavior?

Huge performance improvements.

How should this be implemented in your opinion?

By returning graph object or list from a loader.

Are you willing to work on this yourself?

Yes.

[kdy1]

Yeah actually I made rust module that can generate acorn AST from source code. I’ll check how it performs using swc-loader first. Of course, it has start/end/loc/comments/etc… We need benchmark, but definitely worth trying.

[kdy1]

@alexander-akait Of course, I’d be happy to make it faster.