Microbundle VS Snowpack

I discovered microbundle lately, and I would like to share with you a mini template with the bare essentials and comfort to develop your packages with TypeScript.

For package authoring - microbundle is a handy boilerplate (I would avoid tsdx personally - it’s basically been abandoned for turborepo but that’s not apparent at first glance).

My tech stack was React + Typescript, Storybook for docs, vite.js for build instead of webpack, microbundle for bundling (basically a no-config rollup wrapper), and Google's release please bot for handling release/deployment.

Setting up a modern Typescript or Javascript development stack is a daunting task, there are a lot of moving parts, and sometimes the whole process seems like magic, so I switched to Microbundle. While microbundle handles the compilation, there are a lot of other moving parts that need to be set up to start developing with Nodejs/Typescript (CI, tests, linting, etc). So I've created an opinionated template repository with Typescript, Microbundle, Jest, eslint, husky, prettier, github actions, pnpm, and a bunch of other scripts. It enables me to start developing a library immediately by using the repository as a starter template. Let me know what you think and if some processes could be improved, or some valuable tools that could be added. Pull requests and suggestions are welcomed.

I would recommend starting by using https://github.com/developit/microbundle , as it has pretty good default behavior for generating library output.

Check out microbundle, which is what TSDX started as a typescript alternative to.

I’m quite happy with Microbundle

Pick up Microbundle or something similar.

Then there was Webpack which seemed like it would be around for a while. Even after things like Parcel and Snowpack came on the scene people still recommended Webpack. I mean, it's still the backbone of create-react-app. An then, Vite was released.

Unbundled development utilizes native ESM support in browsers to offer an ultra-fast development experience. Unlike a traditional bundler which bundles everything in development, unbundled development transforms the code and rewrites import paths to the ESM compliant file path without bundling your code. Additionally, most bundlers that do this pre-bundle dependencies because that decreases the number of imports needed, and dependencies are unlikely to change often. The two most prominent bundlers that utilize unbundled development are Vite and Snowpack. Snowpack, created in 2019, was the first bundler to have an unbundled development experience. However, while Snowpack was popular for some time, this did not last forever. In 2020, the team behind Vue created Vite. Vite has many advantages over Snowpack, like the ease of use, speed, better optimization, and more. Additionally, popular projects like SvelteKit adopted Vite instead of Snowpack. All of this helped Vite pass Snowpack in downloads, and it now has more than 10x downloads compared to Snowpack. In fact, even Astro, a project created by the team behind Snowpack (be on the lookout for an article about Astro), is now using Vite. Overall, if you want fast, unbundled development, I recommend Vite.

I've been hearing good things about snowpack and have been wanting to give it a go myself as an alternative to webpack/babel

So how did we get here? Well, it's a good thing to describe alternatives considered when you add issues to a repo! Months ago, @0vortex described in Issue #1131 some opportunities for dependency updates that would require version 5 of webpack with our webpack configuration, and warned that the dependency management would probably be tricky. I fixated on an alternative that he mentioned about converting the project to use Snowpack. I had wanted to learn more about bundling tools, so I took a few days here and there after Thanksgiving and got Open Sauced mostly working with it (see PR #1320).

I have written a post about setting up a React project using Parcel as a bundler which can give a more detailed walkthrough about getting a React application up and running from scratch. There are multiple ways to do this but some of the more common build tools include Webpack, Parcel, and Snowpack.

For more information about this issue, check these issue tickets: Issue 2998, Issue 3219, Issue 3243

The number of transforms that Babel is doing with an "evergreen" config ("last 2 browser versions") at this point is effectively miniscule. It's a massive toolchain for what increasing turns out to be a minimal amount of actual work. "Last 2 Browser Versions" is effectively everything through ES2019 at this point which covers almost all of the "modern JS syntax". If you aren't using custom transforms you might not be transforming anything that matters in Babel in 2021. I've seen a bunch of projects with huge Babel pipelines where the only actual transform was Typescript's type removal and at that point, if your codebase is entirely Typescript, Typescript has all the downlevel transforms you need "baked in" (and arguably a little bit cleaner and simpler to Babel's kitchen sink but also still somehow millions of plugins approach) and it's just setting Typescript's compile option to the ES level you are most comfortable with. (In 2021 that may even be as high as { "target": "es2019" } or higher in your tsconfig.json and even there Typescript's not going to even need to downlevel much.) Typescript can also transform TSX/JSX to JS without the need of Babel, if you are using React.

Even ES2015 modules which some people still think is the big reason to keep Babel around: a) has full Browser support if you use type="module", but most people still want to pack their JS because just about no one is assuming HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 yet, and b) Babel has never done module format transforms, that's always been the domain of your packer (webpack, parcel, rollup, snowpack, what have you).

If you are updating your project stack in 2021 right now my personal top recommendation is that I really like the approach of snowpack (https://www.snowpack.dev/): ES2105 modules with dev experience (which is great), great Typescript support, and a simpler overall config experience than most other options right now. (It uses esbuild under the hood rather than babel for dev and basic transforms/bundling. It can optionally piggy back webpack and parcel for Production bundling that needs more "power".) Especially that <script type='module"> dev experience feels great now (with Hot Module Reloading too) versus waiting for a full bundle even for dev builds.

SvelteKit uses Vite under the hood, which is quite surprising, as Sapper and most tools are developed using Snowpack. Vite 2 is framework-agnostic and designed with SSR at its core.

I've had some success with npm, snowpack, mocha, typescript as that sort of stack for more "vanilla" efforts that feel rather more "modern". I think mocha is easier and cleaner than jest. I like keeping all of my transpilation to just Typescript without needing a massive Babel install/pipeline. snowpack (https://www.snowpack.dev/) right now I think is in a sweet spot of a better "ES Module native" developer experience than webpack and has better defaults when left unconfigured. (So much so that while there are snowpack templates/generators provided by the project I mostly don't use them other than for reference.)