import-maps VS parcel

Long time huge fan of JS. I appreciate your calling out the multi-paradigm aspect; having these first class functions & prototype based inheritance has been so flexible.

TC39 has done a great job shaping the language over the years. New capabilities are usually well thought out & integrate well. Async await has been amazing.

The one major miss that makes me so sad and frustrated is modules; js has gotten better everywhere except it's near requirement for build tooling. Being able to throw some scripts on a page and go is still an unparalleled experience in the world, is so direct & tactile an experience. EcmaScript Modules was supposed to improve things, help get us back, but imports using url specifiers made the whole thing non-modular, was a miss. We're still tangled & torn. Import-maps has finally fixed but it's no where near as straightforward, and it still doesn't work in workers, which leaves us infuriatingly shirt of where the past was. https://github.com/WICG/import-maps/issues/2

makes sure your app is getting the download it expects. Adoption is probably pretty minimal though. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Subres...

I think the big thing making this unlikely though is that very few folks use cdns these days. We designed ESM as a module system for the language, but then took a good fraction of a decade to build import-maps, to let us actually use modules in a modular way. Good news, we can finally use modules modularly! https://caniuse.com/import-maps

Bad news? Oh import-maps only works for the simplest case. Doesn't work in webworkers/service workers. https://github.com/WICG/import-maps/issues/2

The point is that single page apps almost always are bundled together, as using CDNs hasn't even been technically possible.

Also, CDNs are kind of somewhat pointless, now that http caches are partitioned by origin (for security reasons). They might have better anycast infrastructure to get the content out faster, but without the caching there's no inherent advantage. The user will download the same jquery file again in each site they go to, no already having it cached anymore. Bah humbug!

https://github.com/WICG/import-maps/issues/2

Bare specifiers has been the tragedy of ESM. Nice module syntax... that is utterly u deoyable & which has had to have awful de-modularizing specifiers hard-coded into each file to make it work. Abominable sin to introduce "modules" to JS/es2015 then spend a decade dragging everyone along with no story for how to have modular modules.

Import-maps are like "here" to fix this on the web... finally... except they only are shipping to the happiest sunniest easiest case, with Web Workers being totally shit out of luck in spite of some very simple straightforward suggested paths forward. https://github.com/WICG/import-maps/issues/2

I think Deno is making pretty good tradeoffs along the way here. This looks like package.json at surface level, but there is a nightmare of complexity under the surface. Typescript, ESM, cjs all have various pressures they create & in Node it's just incredibly tight & tense dealing with packaging, where-as Deno's happy path of Typescript first does not slowly tatters one over time. It really has been super pleasant being free of the previous world, and having something much more web-platform centric, more intented, with less assembly & less building, and more doing the actual coding.

I really hope import-maps eventually get broader support. Maybe this long-dwelling webworker issue should be brought up with WinterCG.

Import maps proposal

The concept of Import Maps was born in 2018 and made its long way until it was declared a new web standard implemented by Chrome in 2021 and some other browsers.

For package managers, you can use something like import maps to let the user specify which path points to what package, and resolve it properly.

Huh. I was about to complain that this breaks with web standards, but apparently it's being proposed as a standard feature: https://github.com/WICG/import-maps

Interesting!

It runs using Parcel, very simple and easy to setup. The app has 3 files:

Homepage: https://parceljs.org/

In the Changelog Podcast episode referenced above, Dan Abramov alluded to Parcel working on RSC support as well. I couldn’t find much to back up that claim aside from a GitHub issue discussing directives and a social media post by Devon Govett (creator of Parcel), so I can’t say for sure if Parcel is currently a viable option for developing with RSCs.

Parcel 2 emphasizes a zero-configuration approach to bundling web applications. It's a powerful tool that offers a hassle-free developer experience, focusing on simplicity and speed.

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.

Parcel

I’ve tried something similar on the frontend side: I decided to build a UI for Ollama.ai using only HTML, CSS, and JS (Single-Page Application). The goal is to learn something new and have zero runtime dependencies on other projects and NPM modules. Only Node and Parcel.js (https://parceljs.org/) are needed during development for serving files, bundling, etc. The only runtime dependency is a modern browser.

Here's what I have found so far:

- JavaScript (vanilla) is a viable alternative to React.js

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.

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.

There are projects attempting to do more things. I've really enjoyed Parcel (https://parceljs.org). But it won't handle things like linting or unit testing, which you may or may not want. Vite is also pretty popular (https://vitejs.dev/), and it has a test runner.

Thing is, most of the problems described in the post aren't related to low-JS front-end libraries like HTMX or alpine. You can write React without a linter, bundler, build tool, unit testing, or linting. But with any of these projects at scale, you start wanting more:

- If you want to write unit tests in JS, you need to choose a test runner (probably Jest or Vitest -- until the built-in node testing module becomes more common).

- If you want linting, you need a linter (probably Eslint). If you want type safety, you need a type checker (probably Typescript).

- If you want to create smaller JS files to ship to production and to automatically handle assets, you need a bundler.

- If you want to use new language features while supporting old browsers, you need polyfills.

- If you want to use all these things together, you need something to bring it together (like Webpack).

So it really depends what you need! You may not need any. But as you can imagine, in many professional projects with multiple developers it's very nice to have unit tests, linting, and type checking :) (And you start caring about end-user performance a lot more, in which case optimizing the shipped bundle is important.)

Take all that, and then compare to a language like Rust, which has most of the "ecosystem stuff" built-in. In Rust, you get the test runner, the linter, dependency manager, type checker, and documentation tool all included. Easy! Thankfully, Rust doesn't have to care about whether users support modern language features (because it compiles down to lower code ahead of time), or whether the binary shipped to the client is optimally organized for downloading immediately over the internet.

It's a problem in JS because A) you have to care about more problems than many other languages since JS needs to load instantly over the wire in a web browser, and B) there is a huge amount of choice and not a lot of standardization in web tools. (And what standardization there is (Node, npm), there are still competitors trying to even further reduce the pain points.)

I think that in ten more years, we'll be in a better place, because there is push back (like this post!) against these problems, which will encourage more tools trying to solve the explosion of tools. Which seems counterintuitive, but these tools were created to solve very real problems. So I see it as a pendulum which has swung too far, but will likely swing back to a more balanced place. And you see that with tools like Vite gaining popularity.