Suave.IO VS esbuild

This is cool. I just want to give a shoutout to Suave, which is the original inspiration for Giraffe, and is still my go-to web server in F#.

This shouldn't be that hard, I just needed a server that well... served the HTML/CSS/JS files right? I went to my desktop, created an F# script added a couple of libraries like Suave and CliWrap so I could call the dotnet fable command from my F# code and make it compile my Fable files.

Giraffe is a library that sits atop ASP.NET Core and allows developers to build web applications in a functional style; dotnet new giraffe is literally my starting point when I begin a new web application project. (Rather than write three more sentences filled with effusive praise, I’ll just leave it at that; it’s great.) It also provides a view engine (that builds upon Suave‘s “experimental” view engine) which uses an F# DSL to define HTML in a strongly-typed way. It has been incredibly efficient for a while, but with .NET’s work over the past two releases at improving performance, and Giraffe’s adoption of those techniques, it is lightning fast.

Vite is not a bundler but a frontend tool that intelligently uses ESBuild and Rollup for their best use cases.

esbuild 0.21 is out! (https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/releases/tag/v0.21.0) by Evan Wallace Decorators for the win.

Vite is currently the best build tool for bundling Front-end applications. It's so fast because it uses esbuild under the hood. Vite hot reload is the fastest among other development tools I have used.

A big part of my work revolves around JavaScript tooling, and as such it's important to keep an eye on the ecosystem and see where things are going. It's no secret that recently lots of projects are native-ying (??) parts of their codebase, or even rewriting them to native languages altogether. Esbuild is one of the first popular and successful examples of this, which was written in Go. Other examples are Rspack and Turbopack, which are both Rust-based alternatives to Webpack, powered by SWC ("Speedy Web Compiler"). There's also Rolldown, a Rust-based alternative to Rollup powered by OXC ("The JavaScript Oxidation Compiler"), but Rollup itself is also native-ying (??) parts of their codebase and recently started using SWC for parts of their codebase. And finally, there are Oxlint (powered by OXC) and Biome as Rust-based alternatives for Eslint and Prettier respectively.

Angular 17 introduces a significant performance boost by harnessing the capabilities of esbuild, a swift JavaScript bundler. This integration optimizes the build process, reducing build times and enhancing the overall performance of web applications developed with Angular. Developers can now expedite the application development cycle and deployment, leading to a more seamless development experience.

At first we wanted to just get rid of all the helper utilities. Keep only the kernel, but this would mean a loss of backward compatibility. We needed some efficient code processing instead with recomposition and tree-shaking. We needed a bundler. But which one? Our testing approach relies on targets, not sources. We rebuilt the project frequently, speed was critical requirement. In essence, we chose a solution from a couple of among all available alternatives: esbuild and parcel. Esbuild won. Specifically in our case, it proved to be more productive and customizable.

During my search for deploying Lambdas via GitHub actions, I came across a tutorial that utilized ncc for converting TypeScript and bundling. While ncc is effective, I discovered esbuild, which proved to be significantly faster and perfectly suited to my requirements.

The advent of esbuild, the native support for ES Modules in browsers, the widespread adoption of import map, the emergence of tools like Native Federation, and the Nx ecosystem all combine to forge a flexible and well-maintained Micro Frontend Architecture.

EsBuild is a relatively new, blazing-fast JavaScript bundler and minifier. It stands out for its high performance, significantly speeding up the build process in development pipelines.