Design Meeting Notes, 8/30/2024

[DanielRosenwasser]

Adding Compile-Caching Entry Points

#59720

• Node.js now supports V8 compilation caching.
  • Recent PR to Node.js to add module.enableCompilerCache().
  • Previously were ways to do this with 3rd party packages on npm.
• Node.js doesn't do this by default, but things like ts-node does on supported versions of Node.js.
• What's the downside?
  • You need to have require to make this work, awkward for ESM.
  • This is being worked on.
• tsc and tsserver start up about 2.3x faster.
• For executables this is a no-brainer. We can actually use import() there too.
• For libraries, questionable. So the PR doesn't do it.
• The PR must introduce a new entry point for the library. Is this worth the perf improvement?
  • Yes.
  • Just add a comment telling people what's going on and it's fine.
• Another risk - in development we recompile over and over, and that can pollute the cache.
  • The files are pretty small - not a huge risk.
  • We can add hereby clear-node-cache.
• Not going to be immediate - Node-specific work would need to be back-ported in in Node.js 22; otherwise only noticeable in Node 23+.