grunt VS Rollup

Many web pages use CSS and JavaScript files to handle various features and styles. Each file, however, requires a separate HTTP request, which can slow down page loading. Concatenation comes into play here. It involves combining multiple CSS or JavaScript files into a single file. As a result, pages load faster, reducing the time spent requesting individual files. Gulp, Grunt, and Webpack are some of the tools that can assist you in speeding up the concatenation process. They enable seamless merging of many files during development, ensuring deployment readiness.

Once you build a simple Vite backend integration, try not to complicate Vite's configuration unless you absolutely must. Vite has become one of the most popular bundlers in the frontend space, but it wasn't the first and it certainly won't be the last. In my 7 years of building for the web, I've used Grunt, Gulp, Webpack, esbuild, and Parcel. Snowpack and Rome came-and-went before I ever had a chance to try them. Bun is vying for the spot of The New Hotness in bundling, Rome has been forked into Biome, and Vercel is building a Rust-based Webpack alternative.

Keep scripts independent: Keep your scripts independent of each other to avoid dependency issues. If you need to run one script after another, use a task runner like Gulp or Grunt to define tasks and their dependencies.

Browserify was great at bundling scripts, but what if we need to transform code - Say compile CoffeeScript to JavaScript, for this, a new group of tools for the web was born, which focussed on running code transforms. These are usually called task runners, and the most popular ones are Grunt and Gulp.

What we see, a decade ago, are that many of the "popular" libraries, frameworks, and methods, not surprisingly, have gone by the wayside, a lot that have remained in current code as difficult-to-removemodernize legacy cruft (Bower, Gulp, Grunt, Backbone, Angular 1, ...), and then we have the small minority that are still here. Some that remain have had their utility lessened/questioned by platform and language improvements (jQuery, lodash, ...), but very, very few exist that are the same now as they were then. Another fun historical reference: issue #118 of "JavaScript Weekly" (February 22, 2013) includes a first link out to asm.js.

Grunt.js is a favorite tool of mine, while it's most commonly viewed as a (legacy) build system, I've found it to be a fairly robust CLI framework for designing local and automated tasks and still actively develop tasks to this day.

User script template that acts as module and tries to simulate imports. I built this to help me develop my user scripts, after learning about Grunt, and I thought I should share.

With the pre-processors, you can shrink your CSS and increase reuse through variables. In almost all working cases, it will be an improvement above vanilla CSS. There are also implementations now, via PostCSS, that add vendor prefixes for you. The major drawback is, of course, that you have to compile your CSS beforehand; usually done via part of your tooling such as Grunt or Gulp.

As far as build tools go I remember how popular Grunt was when it was first released, then it was Gulp, and Babel came along to help you add new us features and get them working on older browsers.

Doesn't Rollup already use quite a bit of rust[0]? It's actually why I had to abandon it for a project, where they didn't offer binaries for our build platform and I needed to bundle, like 2 ES6 javascript libraries so I just grabbed esbuild instead.

[0] https://github.com/rollup/rollup/tree/master/rust

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.

Read the full breaking changes in Rollup’s release notes for build-related changes in build.rollupOptions.

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.

The optimization points are very valid and good to keep in mind, no?

See for example:

https://github.com/rollup/rollup/issues/349

The missing minification of identifiers and properties of the Vue instance in general were always bugging me in Vue 2, even when not using the class keyword.

This is a very valid consideration IMO.

In the Node.js ecosystem, bundling is typically handled by third-party tools rather than Node.js itself. Some of the most popular bundlers in the Node.js world include Webpack, Rollup, and Parcel, offering features like code splitting, tree shaking, and hot module replacement.

📦 Rollup for bundling

Bundling: Webpack, Parcel, Rollup

Rollup is another popular JavaScript module bundler focusing on high performance. It excels at tree-shaking and uses ES module syntax to generate more performant bundles than traditional module bundlers. In addition to JavaScript, Rollup supports bundling CSS and JSON as well. Rollup has more than 12 million weekly NPM downloads.

Vite (read as vit) is actually a combination of two great frontend tools - an immensely fast development server and a build command for shipping heavily optimized static assets using Rollup. Many developers have encountered the process of setting up a project using Create React App. While CRA can be useful for beginners due to its simplicity and abstraction of configuration, it has some drawbacks that outweigh its benefits, particularly its tendency to be bloated. Don't get me wrong, Vite is opinionated as well, but it's highly extensible through its Plugin API.