tailwindcss-jit VS esbuild-loader

I found this GitHub issue where someone wants to use CSS variables for padding, like so: p-[var(--app-padding)]

Just cruised the JIT docs & code on GitHub (merged into main branch).

> add non-default variations (mostly different heights/widths than what it ships with).

Check out https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss-jit. It got released 3 weeks ago, and supports variable variables in width and height now.

About two weeks ago, Adam Wathan announced a new Tailwind experiment: Just-In-Time. In this article, I'll tell you what it's all about, and how you can take advantage of it.

In the latest Storybook update, we finally got support for PostCSS 8. So, to celebrate this occasion, I've put together a React Storybook environment that includes everyone's favourite utility-first CSS framework: TailwindCSS. The environment also utilizes the TailwindCSS JIT compiler & Webpack 5 to bring the build times as close to instant as possible. And to top it off, the repo includes a simple GitHub action that deploys the Storybook to GitHub pages every time something is pushed.

Tailwind CSS 2.0 with the Just-in-time version

It’s not a setup issue. The JIT works differently: there’s no “purging”. And the issue I described is a known problem: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss-jit/issues/71

Sidestepping the broader conversation, this "JIT tool" is apparently a postcss plugin, which means you have to spawn postcss process (e.g. at every save events or have build tool do the same).

Enter @tailwindcss/jit, a drop-in replacement (though not with 100% feature parity yet) that collects the classes used by your files and only generates the requested classes.

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.