esbuild VS Rollup

Rollup is highly configurable via plugins. It also supports a wide range of transpilation targets. However, it's written in JavaScript (well, TypeScript) so there's a ceiling on how fast it can go. esbuild and swc are orders-of-magnitude faster than Rollup.

Note that `deno bundle` is deprecated. You can almost replace it with esbuild but it currently lacks builtin support for import maps:

    deno run --allow-all https://deno.land/x/[email protected]/mod.js --bundle app.js --outfile=bundle.js. # errors, see: https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/issues/2230

Want to import a package / file conveniently from esm.sh or unpkg or directly from a GitHub repo for a one-off script (for example). To do this I created a custom ESBuild plugin to handle HTTP imports - that worked for ,js files. To support running both ESM and CJS, I use tsx.

esbuild – is an easy-to-configure bundler,

As we iterate on the definition, we are going to want a better developer experience for rebuilding the package on changes. Typically, for a “library” or “utility” style package, I’d reach for either unbuild’s stub concept or use esbuild/tsup/rollup to implement a more traditional watch/rebuild, but in this case, I’m watching a proto file that lives outsides of the source, which breaks assumptions of those tools.

I use ESBuild (https://esbuild.github.io/) as a library for my almost pure Go toolchain, and it covers my requirements for almost 2 years now. ESBuild is the Go tool used in Vite, an incredible tool that I stopped using when I discovered that ESBuild covered all my needs.

As we can see, we have two external dependencies and one internal tool. In the modern way of packaging our application, we would be of course required to package this project using some bundler like ESBuild or Rollup. But with import maps, we can instead utilize CDN's to deliver our packages and completely eliminate the bundling step.

"Why?" you might ask. Vite is built on top of esbuild, a Go-based bundler for the web that is 10-100x faster than other bundlers such as webpack. Vite is also platform-agnostic, so you can learn the tool and use it for many applications.

Internally, esbuild is used. Esbuild has a plugin system, and I created custom plugins to resolve import statements like npm: and https://.

The other option I want to highlight is packaging the project using something like Webpack or esbuild. JS Bundlers transpile all of your separate files and classes (along with all node_modules) into one single file, a practice originally developed to reduce package size for frontend applications. This helps improve the cold start time in Lambda, as unimported files can be pruned and the entire handler becomes one file.

As we iterate on the definition, we are going to want a better developer experience for rebuilding the package on changes. Typically, for a “library” or “utility” style package, I’d reach for either unbuild’s stub concept or use esbuild/tsup/rollup to implement a more traditional watch/rebuild, but in this case, I’m watching a proto file that lives outsides of the source, which breaks assumptions of those tools.

As we can see, we have two external dependencies and one internal tool. In the modern way of packaging our application, we would be of course required to package this project using some bundler like ESBuild or Rollup. But with import maps, we can instead utilize CDN's to deliver our packages and completely eliminate the bundling step.

Vite has a great plugin ecosystem because it leverages the same plugin interface as Rollup, meaning most Rollup plugins are also compatible with Vite. The Vite guide offers more reasons for why you might want to check out Vite.

Other popular build tools include Vite.js, Browserify, Rollup - The bundler behind vite.

Awhile back I wrote about packaging your JavaScript library code into a dual-module bundle (ESM + CommonJS) using Rollup module bundler. Make sure to check it out (it's been updated for Rollup v3!).

While searching for a solution, I came across this issue. Ironically, one of the suggested solutions in there was the initial solution described earlier above. However, there was also another suggestion.

In this blog, we'll cover how to implement a simple login signup functionality using firebase. We'll be using modular JavaScript SDK, which (according to the documentation) provides a reduced SDK size and greater efficiency with modern JavaScript build tools such as Webpack or Rollup.

My go-to front end these days is Lit with web components, rollup, and web dev server.

With tools like webpack (used by create-react-app under the hood), your entire application needs to be bundled in a single file before it can be served to the browser. Vite, on the other hand, takes advantage of native ES modules in the browser to make bundling more efficient with Rollup, serving parts of the source code as needed.

We use Vite as a dev server. This allows you to take advantage of hot reloading in development and easily build and minify code with Rollup integration. Vitest is also provided, so you can write tests in the matching folder.