- The first thing on the "features" list should be something that other compilers cannot do. Esthetics (maybe just say "DX"?) is a nice to have - sometimes VERY nice to have - but should not be positioned as the most important item.

As the original post says the alternatives have poor ESM support - that's a good differentiator.

- Even though ES Modules are part of the ECMAScript standard, having a header stating "(Partial) Support for ECMAScript"- to me, at least - indicates the project does not support base JS features, not that ESM imports have problems. Maybe say "improved ESM support"?

- Docs seem a little bare. For example, the Usage section says:

    # Preinstall Node.js on the target machine
    astra install

Also, no mention of binary limitations in actual docs, despite mention in post.

Hopefully this does not come off as discouraging - this looks like a good project.

I know it'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's where the overton window is in a world of 1gb node_modules folders.

I wish there was a middle ground between this sort of thing and QuickJS (which is actually light, but has a lot of rough edges when it comes to its filesystem and network interfaces)

I'm not sure what the use case is and it doesn't auto-load chromium with its own web server from what I can tell. Is it just for creating javascript CLI utilities?

I wish the JS universe would stop inventing new and wrong names for things.

(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/ELF/Mach-O sections instead (as Bun does) of just YOLOing the attachment with cat.)

Nothing wrong with that, but why call it a compiler instead of bundler which would make the intension obvious