Rollup VS esbuild

Awhile back I wrote about packaging your JavaScript library code into a dual-module bundle (ESM + CommonJS) using Rollup module bundler. Make sure to check it out (it's been updated for Rollup v3!).

While searching for a solution, I came across this issue. Ironically, one of the suggested solutions in there was the initial solution described earlier above. However, there was also another suggestion.

In this blog, we'll cover how to implement a simple login signup functionality using firebase. We'll be using modular JavaScript SDK, which (according to the documentation) provides a reduced SDK size and greater efficiency with modern JavaScript build tools such as Webpack or Rollup.

My go-to front end these days is Lit with web components, rollup, and web dev server.

With tools like webpack (used by create-react-app under the hood), your entire application needs to be bundled in a single file before it can be served to the browser. Vite, on the other hand, takes advantage of native ES modules in the browser to make bundling more efficient with Rollup, serving parts of the source code as needed.

We use Vite as a dev server. This allows you to take advantage of hot reloading in development and easily build and minify code with Rollup integration. Vitest is also provided, so you can write tests in the matching folder.

In this project I use my favorite bundling tool called vite, It is a fast compiler & bundler, and it uses rollup under the hood.

While not too long, css`@apply is a lot to repeat for every class you want to “compile”. That’s why using Vite and some Rollup plugins (Vite uses Rollup under the hood) I was able to shorten it into this:

Most front-end frameworks nowadays include these features as part of their CLI’s such as Create React App, Angular’s ng-cli, etc. For those that don’t, many will use a combination of some type of bundler like Parcel, Rollup, or Webpack and a browser refresher like livereload. This enables you to write code, save it, and immediately see the results. This in turn leads to fast feedback as you iterate all day in this build loop. The native Elm Reactor doesn’t offer this ability and elm-live fits the bill as a small Node.js library to enable this.

Rollup

The other option I want to highlight is packaging the project using something like Webpack or esbuild. JS Bundlers transpile all of your separate files and classes (along with all node_modules) into one single file, a practice originally developed to reduce package size for frontend applications. This helps improve the cold start time in Lambda, as unimported files can be pruned and the entire handler becomes one file.

I wonder how this compares (performance and feature-wise) to esbuild (https://github.com/evanw/esbuild), which is also a bundler written in a compiled language (Go)? esbuild claims to be 10-100x faster than JS-based builders, while Rspack doesn't provide any concrete numbers (at least I didn't find any)...

It uses esbuild so you can write the latest JavaScript syntax while supporting older browsers,

The javascript bundler esbuild is written in Go and is extremely fast for that reason. The author originally tried both Rust and Go and ended up using Go. There is a discussion of why he chose Go here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336284

Now that we have our production-ready app, let’s examine how Nx handles the build process using [esbuild](https://esbuild.github.io/).

// config/esbuild.mjs import path from 'path' import esbuild from 'esbuild' import rails from 'esbuild-rails' import babel from 'esbuild-plugin-babel' esbuild .build({ bundle: true, // Path to application.js folder absWorkingDir: path.join(process.cwd(), 'app/javascript'), // Application.js file, used by Rails to bundle all JS Rails code entryPoints: ['application.js'], // Destination of JS bundle, points to the Rails JS Asset folder outdir: path.join(process.cwd(), 'app/assets/builds'), // Enables watch option. Will regenerate JS bundle if files are changed watch: process.argv.includes('--watch'), // Split option is disabled, only needed when using multiple input files // More information: https://esbuild.github.io/api/#splitting (change it if using multiple inputs) splitting: false, chunkNames: 'chunks/[name]-[hash]', // Remove unused JS methods treeShaking: true, // Adds mapping information so web browser console can map bundle errors to the corresponding // code line and column in the real code // More information: https://esbuild.github.io/api/#sourcemap sourcemap: process.argv.includes('--development'), // Compresses bundle // More information: https://esbuild.github.io/api/#minify minify: process.argv.includes('--production'), // Removes all console lines from bundle // More information: https://esbuild.github.io/api/#drop drop: process.argv.includes('--production') ? ['console'] : [], // Build command log output: https://esbuild.github.io/api/#log-level logLevel: 'info', // Set of ESLint plugins plugins: [ // Plugin to easily import Rails JS files, such as Stimulus controllers and channels // https://github.com/excid3/esbuild-rails rails(), // Configures bundle with Babel. Babel configuration defined in babel.config.js // Babel translates JS code to make it compatible with older JS versions. // https://github.com/nativew/esbuild-plugin-babel babel() ] }) .catch(() => process.exit(1))

You can also roll-up your JS files using a bundler. I use esbuild, and a plugin called glslify so I can include .glsl files, to integrate ThreeJS into my Twine projects.

esbuild.

You should know that CRA is using webpack and babeljs for bundling and compiling the js, jsx to es5( based on your configs), and these two are pretty damn slow! you can change babel with esbuild which you can read here and also there are other articles out there... this will make a hige speedup for you because you are replacing those two which is written by javascript with esbuild which is written by golang that is pretty (fast](https://esbuild.github.io/), actually vite is using esbuild behind the scene and that is why its is super fast!