Ask HN: Building a fast PC for development (JS)

I would look into improving your build before buying new hardware. I'm not at all familiar with Vue but I have been working on a large monorepo based on NW which contains 5 large Angular projects and one large React project (not my choice to combine them).

The initial build probably take 20s but subsequent changes take <1s to the point that HMR feels instant. My laptop specs are similar to yours except only 16gb ram. This is a large Typescript project so I cannot understand what kind of monster would take 32s for incremental builds. There's probably some major improvements to be gained by updating the build (e.g. switch to ESBuild).

Benchmark your build to understand why it's slow. The first thing that jumps out to me is you're using WSL which has non negligible penalties in a few cases. Have you tried dual booting into Linux and running everything natively?

Once you do: benchmark!

It sounds like hardware isn't the problem here, but your tool chain. I don't know enough about it to give insight but it's worthwhile analyzing and googling to see what is taking so long and how to make it faster.