esbuild VS snowpack

I created this little repo to be very barebones but just enough to get started. Esbuild is lighting fast and it's a great jump point to test out some ideas and just start developing without any headache!

esbuild is a general purpose code compiler and build tool that uses golang builds, it is very fast and 1~2 orders of magnitude higher in performance than the existing js toolchain. It's not an out-of-the-box build tool yet, but with its plugin system we can already do a lot of things.

import { Plugin } from 'esbuild' /** * Automatically exclude all dependencies * Some regular expression syntax of js is not supported by golang, see https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/issues/1634 */ export function autoExternal(): Plugin { return { name: 'autoExternal', setup(build) { build.onResolve({ filter: /. */ }, (args) => { if (/^\. {1,2}\//.test(args.path)) { return } return { path: args.path, external: true, } }) }, } }

But then you see stuff like ESBuild, where the Evan Wallace (the author) tried to write in both Rust and Go, and his Go version was faster. According to him, this was probably because Go runs destructors in a parallel thread, whereas Rust runs them in the same thread (source), among other factors. The same performance could theoretically be achieved in Rust, but it would demand a lot more effort.

Use esbuild as a compiler and backend bundler

Will provide an alternative solution for Windows later. (ref: https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/issues/976)

Esbuild is a Javascript build tool written in Go, which pre-bundles dependencies 10-100 times faster than Javascript-based bundlers.

We did this via the npm threads wrapper and esbuild. We first moved all of our compute code into a new file with minimal imports, called imageCompare.worker.js. We then added a pre-compilation step with esbuild to compile this file into a bundle. We then spawn the worker using this generated file as a blob, and interact with it via the threads promise interface.

Though, if you want to use one, do yourself a favor and give esbuild a try. It is orders of magnitude faster, at the cost of less flexibility.

Astro began life with Snowpack as its asset pipeline, which makes perfect sense given that the two projects came originally from the same development team. However, the developers soon reached the decision that Astro would be a better product if it used the impressive Vite package, instead. While the resulting switchover was a breaking change with a capital BC when it occurred, the capabilities it unlocked have proven the exceptional wisdom of this choice.