# SWC

8 Hacker News commenters recommended SWC and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend it as a fast JavaScript compiler, often many times quicker than Babel. The one caveat raised is that its bundler is deprecated.

## Why people recommend it

- Much faster than Babel (3 comments): "We switched a CI pipeline from babel to SWC last year and got roughly 8x improvement" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120771)) "this swc for example is 80x faster then babeljs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47466019)) "but there it's way faster then babel" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47466029))
- Fast built-in transforms (2 comments): "The fact that swc, esbuild, etc. come batteries-included with transforms" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46564277)) "with tools like `swc` for type stripping, it's pretty snappy too" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46271614))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Oxc](https://hackerapproved.com/p/oxc.md): 14 recommend
- [React Compiler](https://hackerapproved.com/p/react-compiler.md): 10 recommend
- [Google Closure Compiler](https://hackerapproved.com/p/google-closure-compiler.md): 6 recommend
- [Babel](https://hackerapproved.com/p/babel.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "SWC", https://hackerapproved.com/p/swc/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).