webpack-bundle-analyzer VS esbuild

Analyze Bundle Size: Use tools like webpack-bundle-analyzer to analyze and reduce your JavaScript bundle size. This can help identify large dependencies that may be slowing down your app.

- `npm run start` - Start the app - `npm run lint` - Lint the project - `npm run test` - Run unit tests - `npm run build` - Build the project - `npm run build:prod` - Build the project in production mode - `npm run build:prod:stats` - Build the project in product mode with stats - `npm run analyse` - Analyse bundle with [webpack-bundle-analyzer](https://github.com/webpack-contrib/webpack-bundle-analyzer) - `npm run compodoc` - Generate [compodoc](https://github.com/compodoc/compodoc) documentation - `npm run version` - Generate changelog - `npm run prettier` - Format the whole project - `npm run audit` - Audit this application using Sonatype OSS Index

If you're using Webpack for bundling your app, there's the very well known webpack-bundle-analyzer which comes as a webpack plugin that you need add in your webpack config file in order to use it.

Then, with the Webpack Bundle Analyzer plugin, we discovered problematic areas in bundles. Bundle Analyzer highlighted our biggest bundles – client-location and map-with-flashing-dots

I used to use webpack-bundle-analyzer but we have switched the builder to browser-esbuild now.

First start by running a webpack bundle analysis to see what exactly is bundled. You might be surprised about things being included that you didn't expect which can help with where to look.

Firstly I recommend taking a look at the structure of the webpack output with something like webpack-bundle-analyzer for any obvious over bundling issues.

See: https://github.com/webpack-contrib/webpack-bundle-analyzer

Webpack Bundle Analyzer

Babel with 49,577,061 npm downloads per week, is the most used tool for JavaScript transformation, we looked at Esbuild as a replacement but many functionalities, most notably loadable support, are missing. Another alternative SWC, written in Rust, supports all the necessary functionalities we need, and on top of that it has APIs similar to Babel, making migration much smoother than other alternatives:

Added a plugin to exclude vendor sourcemaps from the scripts (big reduction) exclude node_modules from source map Issue #1685 · evanw/esbuild · GitHub

You have to use a bundler such as esbuild which will compile your project and bundle all of it's dependencies along with it so they aren't imported. This bypasses the ESM/CommonJS incompatibility issue.

However, when you want to productionize your JS library, you need to bundle it. Otherwise, you will ship all the node_modules. Is used esbuild because it is able to bundle to CJS and ESM. Now, let's run the same benchmark with the bundled version.

Are you familiar with Java?

If so, a web bundler is like a build tool which creates a single fat jar from all your source code and dependencies, so all you have to "deploy" is a single file... except the fat jar is just a (usually minified) js file (and sometimes other resources like a css output file that is the "bundled" version of multiple input CSS files, and other formats that "compile" to CSS, like SCSS [1] which used to be common because CSS lacked lots of features, like variables for example, but today is not as much needed).

Without a bundler, when you write your application in multiple JS files that use npm dependencies (99.9% of web developers), how do you get the HTML to include links to everything? It's a bit tricky to do by hand, so you get a bundler to take one or more "entry points" and then anything that it refers to gets "bundled" together in a single output file that gets minified and "tree-shaken" (dead code elimination, i.e if you don't use some functions of a lib you imported, those functions are removed from the output).

Bundlers also process the JS code to replace stuff like CommonJS module imports/exports with ESM (the now standard module system that browsers support) and may even translate usages of newer features to code that uses old, less convenient APIs (so that your code runs in older browsers).

I've been learning a lot about this because I am writing a project that is built on top of esbuild[2], a web bundler written in Go (I believe Vite uses it, and Vite is included in the benchmarks in this post). It's extremely fast, so fast I don't know why bother writing something in Rust to go even faster, I get all my code compiled in a few milliseconds with esbuild!

Hope that helps.

[1] https://sass-lang.com/documentation/syntax/

[2] https://esbuild.github.io/

Indeed!

They probably took the idea from https://esbuild.github.io

Go has the benefit of not having to reach a distributed consensus amongst a handful of individual browser vendors. Try compiling a large Go project with tinygo to get a glimpse of that experience [1]. If the browser vendors had been able to ship ES4 or ES5 with module support between 1999 and 2009, Node probably would have implemented it and there would be no dichotomy between CJS and ESM.

[1] https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/issues/1111

Vite is not a bundler but a frontend tool that intelligently uses ESBuild and Rollup for their best use cases.

esbuild 0.21 is out! (https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/releases/tag/v0.21.0) by Evan Wallace Decorators for the win.

Vite is currently the best build tool for bundling Front-end applications. It's so fast because it uses esbuild under the hood. Vite hot reload is the fastest among other development tools I have used.