hammer VS esbuild-loader

NX repositories build slower, drop 1000's of dependencies in your project and has configurations so verbose you need vscode plugins to drive it (also I didn't like that I had to drop in project scaffolding templates to provision new library or application types). I disliked using it so much I went ahead and built this thing https://github.com/sinclairzx81/hammer.

My development workflow is principally based on https://github.com/sinclairzx81/hammer which is esbuild tooling I wrote myself. I think these days, if you're using TS and want the rapid development workflow, anything that is leveraging esbuild or swc under the hood will be a good thing to pick. So Vite ticks the esbuild box.

I use https://github.com/sinclairzx81/hammer. It provides watch / reload workflows for both node and browser development and it scales from single applications into large mono repository projects. It takes one dependency (esbuild) and needs next to no configuration to use.

I gave up on community build tooling and ended up rolling my own tools. https://github.com/sinclairzx81/hammer. It's difficult to find any tooling in the community that does all the things you may need it to. I found by investing the time into developing tools to align to my workflows, I'm free to modify those tools without getting bogged down in ecosystem plugins, or arcane configurations, or whatever else.

If you just want to get going, you can try https://github.com/sinclairzx81/hammer, (disclaimer I wrote this), or https://parceljs.org/ . Both are zero configuration and will allow you to add in frameworks as you need them (rather than relying on the kitchen sink project bootstrappers like create-react-app).

i see. there are a loaders like https://github.com/privatenumber/esbuild-loader that works with webpack but i haven't given it a try yet.

you can use it with webpack didn't try it myself

If you are a webpack user and have heard about esbuild speed, you may start questioning your js-bundler choices. Luckily, you don't have to drop your hand-crafted webpack config just now. Thanks to esbuild-loader, you can get part of the speed improvement without doing a whole migration.

esbuild-loader (secret sauce!) fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin (helps us with typechecking) nodemon-webpack-plugin (We can also use webpack-dev-server)

For people already on webpack, there's esbuild-loader (https://github.com/privatenumber/esbuild-loader)

esbuild is a JS and TS bundler that promises ultra-fast build times. We use webpack, and there is support to leverage esbuild with esbuild-loader.

The first thing I did was replace babel-loader and Terser (minification tool) with esbuild-loader. This made our JS compile around 12 times faster, it went down to 1.4 seconds. It was a good start.

In fact, the create-react-app-esbuild is only an encapsulation of esbuild-loader.

I just started using this: privatenumber/esbuild-loader: ⚡️ Speed up your Webpack build with esbuild (github.com)

Both would be good to file. I’m happy to investigate myself if you don’t have the time.

One thing to be aware of is that some other tools that integrate esbuild do so incorrectly. For example, the 3rd-party integration of esbuild into Webpack mis-configures esbuild in a way that causes issues with JSX: https://github.com/privatenumber/esbuild-loader/pull/107. This isn’t a problem with esbuild itself.