rules_nodejs VS esbuild

Bazel is just the infrastructure to run webpack. You'd need to do some work to make webpack's state be cacheable (I dunno what options and such it has for this, maybe it's already there as an option). But if you're looking at Bazel for JS work you probably just want to use the existing and maintained rules for it: https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_nodejs It's been a while since I last looked at it but I don't think it has any caching for webpack.

> Is Bazel designed in a way that make it impossible to do JS monorepos well?

Not impossible, but you really need to go all in with it and follow its conventions and practices. See this for the main docs: https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_nodejs

One thing in particular that doesn't work well in the bazel world is doing your own stuff outside its BUILD.bazel files. If you're used to just npm install and jam some code in your package.json scripts... that doesn't usually work in the bazel world. If you have a lot of logic or tools in your build you'll likely need to go all in and make bazel starlark rules or macros that recreate that logic. Nothing is impossible, but expect to spend time getting up to speed and getting things working the bazel way.

I am using Bazel with rules_nodejs and Webpack. There's an example here.

It is probably possible to build Angular with ts_project(), however you'd need to manually manage the compiler (Angular has its own) and tsconfig (Angular needs special options). ts_library() does a lot of this for you, so I think it would probably be easier to use that than to force yourself onto ts_project(). The canonical Angular example uses ts_library() FWIW: https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_nodejs/tree/master/examples/angular

https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_nodejs

Nx is widely used in the Angular community. The Angular team at Google had plans to add Bazel support to the Angular CLI for many years, but the plans didn't materialize. The key folks (e.g., Alex Eagle) working on the effort left Google. Google employees no longer maintain rules_nodejs.

During my search for deploying Lambdas via GitHub actions, I came across a tutorial that utilized ncc for converting TypeScript and bundling. While ncc is effective, I discovered esbuild, which proved to be significantly faster and perfectly suited to my requirements.

The advent of esbuild, the native support for ES Modules in browsers, the widespread adoption of import map, the emergence of tools like Native Federation, and the Nx ecosystem all combine to forge a flexible and well-maintained Micro Frontend Architecture.

EsBuild is a relatively new, blazing-fast JavaScript bundler and minifier. It stands out for its high performance, significantly speeding up the build process in development pipelines.

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.

Use esbuild to build the React code into a form executable on both the server and client sides.

The functions will bundle using esbuild. For that, it is required to install esbuild globally:

TSX is the newest and most improved version of our ts-node, using ESBuild to transpile TS files to JS very quickly. The most interesting part is that TSX was developed to be a complete replacement for Node, so you can actually use TSX as a TypeScript REPL, if you install it globally with npm i -g tsx, just run tsx in your terminal and you can write TSX natively. But what's even cooler is that you can load TSX for all TypeScript files using --loader tsx when you run your file. For example, let's say we have this file called index.ts:

esbuild plus Vite is out of developer preview and enabled by default, yielding 67%, 87%, 80% speed improvements for build time, hybrid build time and hybrid serve time respectively.

Bundling with esbuild

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.