esbuild VS import-maps

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.

Long time huge fan of JS. I appreciate your calling out the multi-paradigm aspect; having these first class functions & prototype based inheritance has been so flexible.

TC39 has done a great job shaping the language over the years. New capabilities are usually well thought out & integrate well. Async await has been amazing.

The one major miss that makes me so sad and frustrated is modules; js has gotten better everywhere except it's near requirement for build tooling. Being able to throw some scripts on a page and go is still an unparalleled experience in the world, is so direct & tactile an experience. EcmaScript Modules was supposed to improve things, help get us back, but imports using url specifiers made the whole thing non-modular, was a miss. We're still tangled & torn. Import-maps has finally fixed but it's no where near as straightforward, and it still doesn't work in workers, which leaves us infuriatingly shirt of where the past was. https://github.com/WICG/import-maps/issues/2

makes sure your app is getting the download it expects. Adoption is probably pretty minimal though. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Subres...

I think the big thing making this unlikely though is that very few folks use cdns these days. We designed ESM as a module system for the language, but then took a good fraction of a decade to build import-maps, to let us actually use modules in a modular way. Good news, we can finally use modules modularly! https://caniuse.com/import-maps

Bad news? Oh import-maps only works for the simplest case. Doesn't work in webworkers/service workers. https://github.com/WICG/import-maps/issues/2

The point is that single page apps almost always are bundled together, as using CDNs hasn't even been technically possible.

Also, CDNs are kind of somewhat pointless, now that http caches are partitioned by origin (for security reasons). They might have better anycast infrastructure to get the content out faster, but without the caching there's no inherent advantage. The user will download the same jquery file again in each site they go to, no already having it cached anymore. Bah humbug!

https://github.com/WICG/import-maps/issues/2

Bare specifiers has been the tragedy of ESM. Nice module syntax... that is utterly u deoyable & which has had to have awful de-modularizing specifiers hard-coded into each file to make it work. Abominable sin to introduce "modules" to JS/es2015 then spend a decade dragging everyone along with no story for how to have modular modules.

Import-maps are like "here" to fix this on the web... finally... except they only are shipping to the happiest sunniest easiest case, with Web Workers being totally shit out of luck in spite of some very simple straightforward suggested paths forward. https://github.com/WICG/import-maps/issues/2

I think Deno is making pretty good tradeoffs along the way here. This looks like package.json at surface level, but there is a nightmare of complexity under the surface. Typescript, ESM, cjs all have various pressures they create & in Node it's just incredibly tight & tense dealing with packaging, where-as Deno's happy path of Typescript first does not slowly tatters one over time. It really has been super pleasant being free of the previous world, and having something much more web-platform centric, more intented, with less assembly & less building, and more doing the actual coding.

I really hope import-maps eventually get broader support. Maybe this long-dwelling webworker issue should be brought up with WinterCG.

Import maps proposal

The concept of Import Maps was born in 2018 and made its long way until it was declared a new web standard implemented by Chrome in 2021 and some other browsers.

For package managers, you can use something like import maps to let the user specify which path points to what package, and resolve it properly.

Huh. I was about to complain that this breaks with web standards, but apparently it's being proposed as a standard feature: https://github.com/WICG/import-maps

Interesting!