Thank you!

We developed this for our platform and CLI (which are Rust based) which is a bit of a different use-case than a one-off manual run of a linter (in which the difference perhaps wouldn't be as dramatic), although performant tooling for the end user should still be something we strive for IMO.

The "fast JS runtime" was Bun in this case, which we tried specifically because it has faster startup (and we also use in our CLI as a runtime for user defined functions). Most people would be using Node which is much more popular and likely have an even slower startup time.

Quickly creating or editing objects. The main target would be editor extensions, image a snippet that expands to an object on tab for instance

Nickel looks like something akin to Nix (JSON with functions), whereas August's goal is to allow you to quickly write a snippet that expands to your target document (e.g. via an editor extension) like Emmet. You can think of August like a snippet or shortcut to typing (or editing) a document rather than its own configuration language

I heard that they've named it the "SwitchCube Advance SP 3DS"

Multiple, they don't have to accept input but they can like in the DuckDuckGo example. The idea is to set up easy to type commands you can execute quickly

It's more readable and maintainable than ECMAScript regular expressions, which it compiles into

I wouldn't consider Melody a new flavour of regex as it compiles to ECMAScript regular expressions.

I'd consider being more verbose than regular expressions as a great thing for what this project aims to do, regular expressions are very write optimized which is the wrong (IMO) tradeoff to make in a shared codebase (or even your personal code that's more than a few days old) where code is read much more often.

Awesome idea, will definitely take it into consideration when that feature is available. Melody actually has a VSCode extension with highlighting and snippets, could be added to that

That's not supported yet but is planned (see the "reverse compiler" feature in the README)