Perla VS esbuild

Does that import map thing feel familiar? well maybe I spoke about that a few months ago when I wrote about a project of mine (Perla) which uses import maps to allow you to write Single Page Applications without node installed!

If you need to handle dependencies via CDN/Local Dist file then some dependencies won't work because they use node like imports import {} from 'lit/some/sub/directory.js browser imports need to start with / or ./ or even ../ so they can be valid ES module imports thankfully for this you can check out in a shameless plug one of the projects I'm working on: Perla which handles this precise case but I digress, the ideal situation would be you with npm and already figured out how to serve node dependencies to your compiled code.

The most "complex" application would be a webpack alternative in F#: AngelMunoz/Perla and maybe a simple migrations manager AngelMunoz/Migrondi

Not the author, but it doesn't seem like you'll need dotnet installed from the docs

Whew! That was a lot! but shows how to build each part of the Webpack alternative I've been working on Called Perla there are still some gaps though

I keep working on Perla :) https://github.com/AngelMunoz/Perla

I've been working in perla which is a cross-platform executable frontend dev-server/build-tool which is not tied to Nodejs or .NET meaning that you don't need to have .NET installed and neither Nodejs, at the same time it doesn't use npm or other things to handle dependencies it does so by leveraging skypack and import maps to let you use npm dependencies but from a CDN rather than locally.

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.

Unlike Webpack, the Vite DevServer only compiles files when they are requested. It leverages ES module imports, which allow JS files to import other files without needing to bundle them together during development. When one file changes, only that file needs to be re-compiled, and the rest can remain unchanged. Project files are compiled with Rollup.js. Third-party dependencies in node_modules are pre-compiled using the ultra-fast esbuild bundler for maximum speed, and they are cached until the dependency version changes. Vite also provides a client script for hot module reloading.

Use esbuild to build the React code into a form executable on both the server and client sides.

The functions will bundle using esbuild. For that, it is required to install esbuild globally:

TSX is the newest and most improved version of our ts-node, using ESBuild to transpile TS files to JS very quickly. The most interesting part is that TSX was developed to be a complete replacement for Node, so you can actually use TSX as a TypeScript REPL, if you install it globally with npm i -g tsx, just run tsx in your terminal and you can write TSX natively. But what's even cooler is that you can load TSX for all TypeScript files using --loader tsx when you run your file. For example, let's say we have this file called index.ts:

esbuild plus Vite is out of developer preview and enabled by default, yielding 67%, 87%, 80% speed improvements for build time, hybrid build time and hybrid serve time respectively.

Bundling with esbuild

Besides Webpack, there are many other popular web bundlers available, such as Parcel, Esbuild, Rollup, and more. They all have their own unique features and strengths, and you should make your decision based on the needs and requirements of your specific project. Please refer to their official websites for details.