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rules_ts benchmarks

Blog post from Aspect Build

Post Details
Company
Date Published
Author
Greg Magolan
Word Count
1,118
Language
English
Hacker News Points
-
Summary

Aspect's rules_ts is an enhancement of the @bazel/typescript package, providing a ts_project rule that is layered on top of Aspect's high-performance rules_js, resulting in significant performance improvements for TypeScript builds. The benchmarks compare the build times of this new ts_project with its predecessor and other TypeScript tools like ts_library and the vanilla tsc compiler, using a large generated TypeScript codebase. The tests were conducted on a MacBook Pro and involved both full clean builds and "devserver" builds, which mimic typical development workflows by excluding real-time type-checking. Results show that while ts_library from Google leads in full clean build times due to its deep integration with the TypeScript compiler, ts_project from rules_ts offers a competitive performance with added worker mode support. In "devserver" builds, ts_project configured with swc as the transpiler demonstrates a significant speed advantage, offering nearly instantaneous build times by separating transpilation from type-checking. The benchmarks suggest that rules_ts, with its improved build times and efficient npm dependency management, can enhance developer productivity and encourage more web developers to adopt Bazel for their JavaScript projects.