Show HN: Astra – a new js2exe compiler

Looks like a good start. A few notes:<p>- The first thing on the &quot;features&quot; list should be something that other compilers cannot do. Esthetics (maybe just say &quot;DX&quot;?) is a nice to have - sometimes VERY nice to have - but should not be positioned as the most important item.<p>As the original post says the alternatives have poor ESM support - that&#x27;s a good differentiator.<p>- Even though ES Modules are part of the ECMAScript standard, having a header stating &quot;(Partial) Support for ECMAScript&quot;- to me, at least - indicates the project does not support base JS features, not that ESM imports have problems. Maybe say &quot;improved ESM support&quot;?<p>- Docs seem a little bare. For example, the Usage section says:<p><pre><code> # Preinstall Node.js on the target machine astra install </code></pre> Which machine is the &quot;target&quot; machine? I would assume, in the context of compiling, that the target would be the machine you are compiling for... but installing software remotely seems out of scope. Does it install it locally, or swap the bundled installation in the .exe?<p>Also, no mention of binary limitations in actual docs, despite mention in post.<p>Hopefully this does not come off as discouraging - this looks like a good project.

This is not a compiler. It is doing no program translation. No register allocation. No parsing. No linking. It in no way resembles a compiler. Not every program that produces an executable file is a compiler just because <i>some</i> programs you may have heard of, like gcc, <i>are</i> in fact compilers.<p>I wish the JS universe would stop inventing new and wrong names for things.<p>(That said, this thing is at least using postject for actual insertion of the payload blob into the target executable, and based on its README, postjecth as the good taste to embed data as PE&#x2F;ELF&#x2F;Mach-O sections instead (as Bun does) of just YOLOing the attachment with cat.)

To understand the underlying architecture- is my understanding correct that this runs esbuild to bundle then bundles that with node runtime and creates a binary that executes &quot;node index.js&quot;?

Very interesting. The readme notes &quot;Different than the others - Astra is a new approach to compiling JavaScript&#x2F;TypeScript applications. It uses a different method than other compilers like pkg or nexe.&quot; but never really explains what the difference is. Is it just that the code is run through esbuild before the SEA step or is there some other &quot;magic sauce&quot;?

You probably want to put that information in your README.md, because there is barely any information in the readme, and the docs look to be a placeholder atm =)

This is really interesting, got it up and running very quickly.<p>I&#x27;m not sure what the use case is and it doesn&#x27;t auto-load chromium with its own web server from what I can tell. Is it just for creating javascript CLI utilities?

I don&#x27;t get it, does this project do anything other than embedding js and node in a single executable?<p>Nothing wrong with that, but why call it a compiler instead of bundler which would make the intension obvious

I clicked on this hoping for an actual compiler. However from what I can see this is a bundler. The name is confusing.

&gt; Average exe is ~70-80MB (depends on your code) so it&#x27;s lighter than most compilers<p>I know it&#x27;s JS not actually a compiler but a bundler that just packs node in with your code, but I still had a nice laugh at 80mb being light. I suppose that&#x27;s where the overton window is in a world of 1gb node_modules folders.<p>I wish there was a middle ground between this sort of thing and QuickJS (which is <i>actually</i> light, but has a lot of rough edges when it comes to its filesystem and network interfaces)