esbuild VS terser

ESBuild is a bundler. The subtitle on the website is literally “An extremely fast bundler for the web”. To bundle, pass —-bundle flag.

https://esbuild.github.io/

esbuild for bunding both the client and server separately

> like individual loaders/modules are/were slow, rather than webpack itself

tbh this is just nitpicking, I'm not a react developer to do CRA debugging for them. They're paid by Facebook a couple orders of magnitude more than what we're making here, and if they're fine with the intact CRA configuration being that slow, while a third-party alternative rips through the massive pile of shit I'm working on while not bringing any obvious downsides, I'll just to the alternative.

It's a well known problem: esbuild, which is the base of vite's HMR, boasts of speeds dozens to hundreds of times faster than webpack:

https://github.com/evanw/esbuild?tab=readme-ov-file#why

Micro-frontend has always aroused my curiosity: I wanted to understand how they work, how to build them, what their pros and cons are. In 2018, inspired by this topic, I tried to build something similar to single-spa in one of the pet projects. At that time, there was no Webpack Module Federation (WMF), and Webpack itself seemed inconvenient. The choice fell on ESBuild and importmap. Browser support for importmap at the time was mostly on paper or with special flags in browsers. For this reason, I used a polyfill. But, surprisingly, everything worked and even in several projects.

Why esbuild? compared to other tools esbuild keeps things minimal, it is very fast(the fastest bundler as of today) and supports typescript and esm by default.

Instant Hot Module Replacement (HMR): During development, Vite only processes the changed files and updates them in the browser instantly, making it incredibly fast and responsive. Optimized Build Process: Vite uses esbuild under the hood for fast JavaScript transpilation, which is significantly faster than Babel. Production Build with Rollup: For production builds, Vite uses Rollup, a highly efficient bundler that produces optimized code.

We have transitioned to using Esbuild for our project's build process and, experiencing a substantial increase in speed compared to our previous setup with Webpack. The primary bottleneck we faced with Webpack was its long build times. Now, with Esbuild integrated into our development environment, our build times have been dramatically reduced to about five seconds, significantly enhancing the efficiency of our workflow.

However, new tools such as SWC and esbulid now also support JS code compression, and their execution efficiency is higher. After all, Rust or Go inherently have much higher execution efficiency than JS.

When executing esbuild bundled code with --platform=node you may have come across one of the following runtime errors:

Use free tools like Terser for JavaScript and CSSNano for CSS:

The bin/deploy script runs a production build (the CSS is compressed with no source maps and the Elm code is optimized with mdgriffith/elm-optimize-level-2 and minified with Terser), uses git-worktree to check out the gh-pages branch into a temporary directory, copies the files HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files from the build directory, commits the changes and pushes them up to the remote repository so that GitHub Pages could host the new files.

Terser (JavaScript) Terser is a modern and powerful tool for JavaScript minification. It is an evolution of UglifyJS, with support for ES6+. You can use it directly in build tools like Webpack or through the CLI.

Terser

These projects use Caddy as my local development server, Dart Sass for converting my Sass files to CSS, elm, elm-format, elm-optimize-level-2, elm-review, elm-test (only in Calculator), ShellCheck to find bugs in my shell scripts, and Terser to mangle and compress JavaScript code.

During my intial search i came across some outdated libraries like javascript-obfuscator and uglify-js(as if javascript code can get any uglier, am I right?). Then, I stumbled upon Terser, a modern library that supports ES6.

Example: You've got a main.js file that's as long as a Tolstoy novel. Fix: Use tools like UglifyJS or Terser to minify your code. They'll squeeze out all the unnecessary bits and give you a sleeker, faster-loading file.

They can do it, it is just turned off by default and require more advanced configuration.

https://github.com/terser/terser#cli-mangling-property-names...

Minifying is a common practice for optimizing production code. (for example, using Terser to minify and mangle JavaScript).

Minification: UglifyJS, Terser