web-app-template VS lightningcss

I have been using esbuild for a while, and I can say that it's looking like a huge improvement over webpack, snowpack, vite, etc.

I made a web app starter that uses esbuild to bundle a react-redux app [0] and my experience was very positive of the bundler.

[0] https://github.com/samhuk/tree-starter

So I recently created a new version of that which uses esbuild instead, and I was able to get it up and running in <1 day (with 0 esbuild experience): https://github.com/samhuk/tree-starter

Would you consider using some libraries in your project? There are lots of good ones in the Rust ecosystem, and many of them are not part of any existing browsers.

For example:

- https://github.com/servo/html5ever (HTML parsing - note: this is used in Servo)

- https://github.com/parcel-bundler/lightningcss (CSS parsing)

- https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy (web layout)

- https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text (text layout and rendering)

Obviously you should be free to work on whatever you like, but just as a benchmark on the scope of your project: I spent ~6 months implementing just the CSS Grid algorithm in Taffy last year. An entire browser from literal scratch is probably a 10 year project for one person.

Libraries for a lot of this stuff exist (albeit in many cases not very mature yet):

- https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text does text layout (which Taffy explicitly considers out of scope)

- https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit does accessibility

- https://github.com/servo/rust-cssparser does value-agnostic CSS parsing (it will parse the general syntax but leaves value parsing up to the user, meaning you can easily add support for whatever properties you what). Libraries like https://github.com/parcel-bundler/lightningcss implement parsing for the standard css properties.

- There are crates like https://github.com/BurntSushi/bstr and https://docs.rs/wtf8/latest/wtf8/ for working with non-unicode text

We are planning to add a C API to Taffy, but tbh I feel like C is not very good for this kind of modularised approach. You really want to be able to expose complex APIs with enforced type safety and this isn't possible with C.

Background: I encountered this problem using lightningcss.

You can do it - that's actually exactly what my project is doing. I have a single repository with a Rust project, that builds the .wasm file (+ .d.ts + .js) using wasm-pack, and a Node.js project, that uses this .wasm file. There's no problem in packing that and exposing as a npm package. See parcel-bundler/lightningcss for a full blown example (it's not using wasm-pack but builds the Rust project directly).

Initial commit, 9 Oct 2021. That is pretty new.