deckdeckgo VS esbuild

We are developing a proof of concept to port our web app, DeckDeckGo, to DFINITY's Internet Computer.

Exciting news, we received a 25k USD grant from the DFINITY foundation to port our web editor for slides, DeckDeckGo, to the Internet Computer.

I recently developed plugins and, migrated all the utilities of DeckDeckGo to build these with esbuild.

I recently published a new open source plugin to export Figma frames to DeckDeckGo slides.

Anyone can try out DeckDeckGo, there is no mandatory login or sign-in upfront if you just want to give it a try. It is something really important to us, we are not chasing data or number of users, we are developing an editor for presentations for users’ who want to use it, or not 😉. That being said, if users want to share publicly their presentations, because we don’t want to have too much “This is a test” or “Yolo” decks publicly published, respectively avoid if possible not meaningful public content, we do restrict our “publishing process” (the one in which we transform and deploy the presentations online as Progressive Web Apps), to signed users. For these processes, we are using the ability given by Firebase to use anonymous users. That’s why, in addition to verify the tokens, I also add to check this information. Fortunately, this can also be solved easily, as the payload provided by the verifyToken function does contain such information.

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.