stylus VS parcel

Traditionally CSS lacked features such as variables, nesting, mixins, and functions. This was frustrating for Developers as it often led to CSS quickly becoming complex and cumbersome. In an attempt to make code easier and less repetitive CSS pre-processors were born. You would write CSS in the format the pre-processor understood and, at build time, you'd have some nice CSS. The most common pre-processors these days are Sass, Less, and Stylus. Any examples I give going forward will be about Sass as that's what I'm most familiar with.

Stylus

The Stylus is built on Node.js. It differs from Sass and Less, which are more opinionated to the syntax; the stylus allows you to omit semicolons, colons, and braces if you want at any time. Another cool feature is that the stylus has a property lookup feature. You can do that easily if you set property X relative to property Y's value. The stylus can be more concise because of its flexibility, but it depends on your preferred syntax.

ng new test1 ? Would you like to add Angular routing? Yes ? Which stylesheet format would you like to use? > CSS SCSS [ http://sass-lang.com ] SASS [ http://sass-lang.com ] LESS [ http://lesscss.org ] Stylus [ http://stylus-lang.com ]

first of all, quit using css. get on board Stylus @ https://stylus-lang.com/

The term you are looking for is "nesting". CSS currently does not support it. But there is a draft being worked on. No browser currently supports it, though. Most CSS Pre- or Postprocessors like Sass, Less, Stylus, PostCSS support nesting.

// schema.json { "$schema": "http://json-schema.org/schema", "cli": "nx", "$id": "ReactLibrary", "title": "", "type": "object", "properties": { "name": { "type": "string", "description": "Library name", "$default": { "$source": "argv", "index": 0 }, "x-prompt": "What name would you like to use for the library?", "pattern": "^[a-zA-Z].*$" }, "directory": { "type": "string", "description": "A directory where the lib is placed.", "alias": "dir" }, "domain": { "description": "Domain where this library belongs.", "type": "string", "default": "none", "alias": "dom", "x-prompt": { "message": "Which domain this library belongs?", "type": "list", "items": [ { "value": "web", "label": "Web" }, { "value": "common", "label": "Common" } ] } }, "scope": { "type": "string", "description": "A scope for the lib.", "alias": "sc" }, "type": { "description": "Library type", "type": "string", "alias": "t", "x-prompt": { "message": "Select library type?", "type": "list", "items": [ { "value": "data", "label": "Data" }, { "value": "model", "label": "Model" }, { "value": "util", "label": "Util" }, { "value": "feature", "label": "Feature" }, { "value": "ui", "label": "Ui" } ] } }, "style": { "description": "The file extension to be used for style files.", "type": "string", "default": "none", "alias": "s", "x-prompt": { "message": "Which stylesheet format would you like to use?", "type": "list", "items": [ { "value": "css", "label": "CSS" }, { "value": "scss", "label": "SASS(.scss) [ http://sass-lang.com ]" }, { "value": "styl", "label": "Stylus(.styl) [ http://stylus-lang.com ]" }, { "value": "less", "label": "LESS [ http://lesscss.org ]" }, { "value": "styled-components", "label": "styled-components [ https://styled-components.com ]" }, { "value": "@emotion/styled", "label": "emotion [ https://emotion.sh ]" }, { "value": "styled-jsx", "label": "styled-jsx [ https://www.npmjs.com/package/styled-jsx ]" }, { "value": "none", "label": "None" } ] } }, "linter": { "description": "The tool to use for running lint checks.", "type": "string", "enum": ["eslint", "tslint"], "default": "eslint" }, "unitTestRunner": { "type": "string", "enum": ["jest", "none"], "description": "Test runner to use for unit tests.", "default": "jest" }, "skipFormat": { "description": "Skip formatting files.", "type": "boolean", "default": false }, "skipTsConfig": { "type": "boolean", "default": false, "description": "Do not update `tsconfig.json` for development experience." }, "pascalCaseFiles": { "type": "boolean", "description": "Use pascal case component file name (e.g. `App.tsx`).", "alias": "P", "default": false }, "routing": { "type": "boolean", "description": "Generate library with routes." }, "appProject": { "type": "string", "description": "The application project to add the library route to.", "alias": "a" }, "publishable": { "type": "boolean", "description": "Create a publishable library." }, "buildable": { "type": "boolean", "default": false, "description": "Generate a buildable library." }, "importPath": { "type": "string", "description": "The library name used to import it, like `@myorg/my-awesome-lib`." }, "component": { "type": "boolean", "description": "Generate a default component.", "default": true }, "js": { "type": "boolean", "description": "Generate JavaScript files rather than TypeScript files.", "default": false }, "globalCss": { "type": "boolean", "description": "When `true`, the stylesheet is generated using global CSS instead of CSS modules (e.g. file is `*.css` rather than `*.module.css`).", "default": false }, "strict": { "type": "boolean", "description": "Whether to enable tsconfig strict mode or not.", "default": true }, "setParserOptionsProject": { "type": "boolean", "description": "Whether or not to configure the ESLint `parserOptions.project` option. We do not do this by default for lint performance reasons.", "default": false }, "standaloneConfig": { "description": "Split the project configuration into `/project.json` rather than including it inside `workspace.json`.", "type": "boolean" }, "compiler": { "type": "string", "enum": ["babel", "swc"], "default": "swc", "description": "Which compiler to use." } }, "required": ["name", "type", "scope", "domain"] }

Finally we need to load the bootstrap css. VuePress ships with stylus by default now, but we can still import css into our stylus file at .vuepress/styles/index.styl

Uhh... yeah. But if you want to omit the braces and semicolons you can check this preprocessor https://stylus-lang.com You will enjoy the landing page, LoL. Maybe even get motivated.

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.

There are projects attempting to do more things. I've really enjoyed Parcel (https://parceljs.org). But it won't handle things like linting or unit testing, which you may or may not want. Vite is also pretty popular (https://vitejs.dev/), and it has a test runner.

Thing is, most of the problems described in the post aren't related to low-JS front-end libraries like HTMX or alpine. You can write React without a linter, bundler, build tool, unit testing, or linting. But with any of these projects at scale, you start wanting more:

- If you want to write unit tests in JS, you need to choose a test runner (probably Jest or Vitest -- until the built-in node testing module becomes more common).

- If you want linting, you need a linter (probably Eslint). If you want type safety, you need a type checker (probably Typescript).

- If you want to create smaller JS files to ship to production and to automatically handle assets, you need a bundler.

- If you want to use new language features while supporting old browsers, you need polyfills.

- If you want to use all these things together, you need something to bring it together (like Webpack).

So it really depends what you need! You may not need any. But as you can imagine, in many professional projects with multiple developers it's very nice to have unit tests, linting, and type checking :) (And you start caring about end-user performance a lot more, in which case optimizing the shipped bundle is important.)

Take all that, and then compare to a language like Rust, which has most of the "ecosystem stuff" built-in. In Rust, you get the test runner, the linter, dependency manager, type checker, and documentation tool all included. Easy! Thankfully, Rust doesn't have to care about whether users support modern language features (because it compiles down to lower code ahead of time), or whether the binary shipped to the client is optimally organized for downloading immediately over the internet.

It's a problem in JS because A) you have to care about more problems than many other languages since JS needs to load instantly over the wire in a web browser, and B) there is a huge amount of choice and not a lot of standardization in web tools. (And what standardization there is (Node, npm), there are still competitors trying to even further reduce the pain points.)

I think that in ten more years, we'll be in a better place, because there is push back (like this post!) against these problems, which will encourage more tools trying to solve the explosion of tools. Which seems counterintuitive, but these tools were created to solve very real problems. So I see it as a pendulum which has swung too far, but will likely swing back to a more balanced place. And you see that with tools like Vite gaining popularity.