> I would say the primary motivators at this point have shifted from browser compatibility to syntaxes like TypeScript and JSX that will (likely) never be supported natively
I suggest using a single-pass transpiler like Surcase[0] that doesn't translate to IE11-compatible syntax, and just loops through the string once, avoiding generating an AST– making it much faster– removing TypeScript annotations and desugaring JSX.
If you additionally need to support IE11, you can use a development build with Surcase and a production build with a bundler like Snowpack. C/C++ developers have been doing things like this for ages: compiling files as objects during development, and compiling them into one big binary for production.
Surcase is often slower than ESBuild since it is single-threaded. The benchmark posted on its README forces ESBuild to run single-threaded, and is thus a bit misleading.
I suggest using a single-pass transpiler like Surcase[0] that doesn't translate to IE11-compatible syntax, and just loops through the string once, avoiding generating an AST– making it much faster– removing TypeScript annotations and desugaring JSX.
If you additionally need to support IE11, you can use a development build with Surcase and a production build with a bundler like Snowpack. C/C++ developers have been doing things like this for ages: compiling files as objects during development, and compiling them into one big binary for production.
[0]: https://github.com/alangpierce/sucrase