Embedded Sass is Live

After several years of planning and development, I’m excited to finally announce the stable release of Embedded Dart Sass along with its first official wrapper, the sass-embedded package available now on npm!

Embedded Sass is an ongoing effort to make a highly-performant Sass library available to as many different languages as possible, starting with Node.js. Although Node.js already has access to the pure-JS sass package, the nature of JavaScript inherently limits how quickly this package can process large Sass files especially in asynchronous mode. We expect sass-embedded to be a major boon to developers for whom compilation speed is a concern, particularly the remaining users of node-sass for whom performance has been a major reason to avoid Dart Sass.

The sass-embedded package fully supports the new JS API as well as the legacy API other than a few cosmetic options. You can use it as a drop-in replacement for the sass package, and it should work with all the same build plugins and libraries. Note that sass-embedded is a bit faster in asynchronous mode than it is in synchronous mode (whereas the sass package was faster in synchronous mode). For substantial Sass files, running sass-embedded in either mode will generally be much faster than sass.

In order to limit the confusion about which version of which package supports which feature, the sass-embedded package will always have the same version as the sass package. When new features are added to the JS API, they’ll be supported at the same time in both packages, and when new language features are added to Sass they’ll always be included in a new sass-embedded release straight away.

How it WorksHow it Works permalink

Embedded Sass is composed of three parts:

1. The compiler, a Dart executable that wraps Dart Sass and does the actual heavy lifting of parsing and compiling the files. Dart native executables are generally much faster than JavaScript, so using them for the computationally-intensive work of stylesheet evaluation is where Embedded Sass gets its speed.

2. The host, a library in any language (in this case JavaScript) that provides a usable end-user API for invoking the compiler. The host provides callers with configuration options, including the ability to define custom importers and Sass functions that are used by the compilation.

3. The protocol, a protocol-buffer-based specification of how the host and the compiler communicate with one another. This communication happens over the standard input and output streams of the compiler executable, which is invoked by the host to perform each compilation.

Other LanguagesOther Languages permalink

Embedded Sass was designed in part as a way for languages other than JavaScript to have access to the full power of Sass compilation with custom importers and functions, similarly to how C++ wrappers for LibSass worked in the past. We hope that community members will use this protocol to implement embedded hosts for many other popular frontend languages. If you end up doing so, message us on Twitter or Gitter and we’ll link it on this site!