snowpack VS parcel

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.

Additional features for Bun include a transpiler and package manager. As hinted at in the name, it also includes bundling features, giving you the functionality that would otherwise require another tool, such as Snowpack or rollup.js. It also has a dead code elimination feature through its JavaScript minifier.

Even, there are several bundling tools available, including popular ones like Webpack and Snowpack.

once upon a time there was this thing called Snowpack: https://www.snowpack.devwhich had a lot of promises as vite (rollup w/ esm). So I migrated a project over from CRA to this thing.While startup speed was much much faster, it actually didn't make the app useable. I timed it meticulously for both CRA and snowpack build and found that the TTI was almost identical. I am not claiming the same to be vite but it's possible and I don't have a large app to prove it..

Snowpack.

> special snowflake build toolchains

That reminds me, wasn't there a build tool called Snowflake?

Oh, it was called Snowpack [1]. And it's no longer being actively maintained. Yeesh.

[1]: https://www.snowpack.dev/

Snowpack app - a single HTML page with Snowpack configuration

The first thing we need is a JavaScript project for our app. We'll use Snowpack as our bundler. Open a terminal located in a directory for the project and type npx create-snowpack-app react-couchdb --template @snowpack/app-template-minimal. Snowpack will create a skeleton for our React application and install all dependencies. Once it's done doing its job, type cd react-couchdb to get into the newly created project directory. create-snowpack-app is very similar to create-react-app in how it sets-up your project, but it's a lot less intrusive (You don't even need to use eject at any point).

Snowpack appears to be no longer maintained.

Before you get too deep into Snowpack, be aware that they recommend using other tools now because it’s no longer maintained.

At first we wanted to just get rid of all the helper utilities. Keep only the kernel, but this would mean a loss of backward compatibility. We needed some efficient code processing instead with recomposition and tree-shaking. We needed a bundler. But which one? Our testing approach relies on targets, not sources. We rebuilt the project frequently, speed was critical requirement. In essence, we chose a solution from a couple of among all available alternatives: esbuild and parcel. Esbuild won. Specifically in our case, it proved to be more productive and customizable.

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.