esbuild VS webpack

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:

17. Webpack

The JS code gets transpiled by tools like Babel, then bundled (often by Webpack) into a single or few files (like bundle.js). This optimizes the website to load faster, as the browser can fetch everything from one file instead of multiple.

Remember that Webpack is highly configurable, and this article only scratches the surface of what's possible. Be sure to check the official Webpack documentation for more detailed information and advanced configurations.

Website: webpack.js.org

With Webpack 5, a new feature has helped microfrontends proliferate: Module Federation. Module Federation allows JavaScript code to be loaded — synchronously or asynchronously — at runtime.

Firefox: Extensions utilizing bundlers like webpack or Extension.js require zipped source code. Additionally, Firefox mandates submissions in Cross-Platform Install (XPI) format.

Webpack is one of the oldest and most widely used bundlers in web development, created by Tobias Koppers in 2012. It gained popularity after Browserify and RequireJS and has become the go-to choice for managing complex projects.

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.

Packagers are the ones we most frequently come into contact with, such as Webpack Vite and Parcel. The latter may not be commonly used, but it is also a well-established tool.

npm packages dramatically sped up the productivity of developers by being able to leverage other developers' work. However, it had a major disadvantage: cjs was not compatible with web browsers. To solve this problem, the concept of bundlers was born. browserify was the first bundler which essentially worked by traversing an entry point and "bundling" all the require()-ed code into a single .js file compatible with web browsers. As time went on, other bundlers with additional features and differentiators were introduced. Most notably webpack, parcel, rollup, esbuild and vite (in chronological order).