Guidelines on implementing plugins?

[cyjake]

Need to port https://www.npmjs.com/package/babel-plugin-import

A simple regex replacer might suffice but I'd like to learn the recommended way to implement plugins for swc.

[kdy1]

Currently plugin system is not ready yet.

I'm considering

1. Embed plugins in swc binary

This make deploying plugins easier, and allow me maintaining plugins on swc update.
(codes will live in a module like swc_ecma_transforms::plugin::xxx)

Also, this option allows me to update plugins when types of ast node is changed.

Note: I can write plugins. (It's an easy task to me)

2. dll / so based

Seems ideal option, but dependency hell might occur.

3. Custom binary built by user with additional transform

It means building a rust library / command line app which depends on swc. If you pick binary, deploying would not be that hard.

See: https://github.com/izelnakri/mber-rust

4. IPC-based plugin

protobuf work in this way, and it allows writing plugin in any language.

5. js plugin interface

I thought this is the best, but context switching and serializing native object is really slow.

6. DSL

There's some languages written in rust.
See: https://github.com/gluon-lang/gluon

7. njs form nginx

This seems attractive, but some investigation is required.

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Which option do you prefer?

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Edit: typo
Edit: njs

[kdy1]

Closing in favor of #471.

[kdy1]

@cyjake
Javascript based plugin is almost done, and there's a basic example of using plugin.
See https://github.com/swc-project/node-swc/blob/d51369e43e590fa66ddc2db6ca39976cdd185ac9/__tests__/transform/plugin.js

[kdy1]

@cyjake See https://swc-project.github.io/docs/usage-plugin

[cyjake]

Awesome! I'll try implementing babel-plugin-import this week

[matzeeable]

Hey @cyjake !

Are there any news about the plugin? :-)

[cyjake]

@matzeeable @kdy1 Probably a bit too late for this experiment since the js api will be deprecated in swc v2, anyway here it goes https://github.com/cyjake/swc-plugin-import/blob/master/src/import.ts#L32

How do I replace one ImportDeclaration with multiple ones? For example,

import { debounce, throttle } from 'lodash';

should be replaced with,

import debounce from 'lodash/debounce';
import throttle from 'lodash/throttle';

I think I'll give it a try no matter the stable API is in JavaScript or in Rust. Trying to replace babel with swc in my own bundler called Porter in the foreseeable month.

[kdy1]

js api may not be deprecated.
It depends on #2175

If you are using rust, you can handle it in fold_module_items or visit_mut_module_items.

[cyjake]

@kdy1 any example code of writing plugin in Rust? Need some template code to get started 😂

[kdy1]

@cyjake I documented about it at https://docs.rs/swc/0.65.0/swc/#cutomizing
I wrote documents for someone building a custom node binding, but plugin API will be almost identical.

[ankitchouhan1020]

If anyone is still looking for one, here is my implementation. swc-plugin-transform-import.

[swc-bot]

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