Snowpack VS vite

Then there was Webpack which seemed like it would be around for a while. Even after things like Parcel and Snowpack came on the scene people still recommended Webpack. I mean, it's still the backbone of create-react-app. An then, Vite was released.

Unbundled development utilizes native ESM support in browsers to offer an ultra-fast development experience. Unlike a traditional bundler which bundles everything in development, unbundled development transforms the code and rewrites import paths to the ESM compliant file path without bundling your code. Additionally, most bundlers that do this pre-bundle dependencies because that decreases the number of imports needed, and dependencies are unlikely to change often. The two most prominent bundlers that utilize unbundled development are Vite and Snowpack. Snowpack, created in 2019, was the first bundler to have an unbundled development experience. However, while Snowpack was popular for some time, this did not last forever. In 2020, the team behind Vue created Vite. Vite has many advantages over Snowpack, like the ease of use, speed, better optimization, and more. Additionally, popular projects like SvelteKit adopted Vite instead of Snowpack. All of this helped Vite pass Snowpack in downloads, and it now has more than 10x downloads compared to Snowpack. In fact, even Astro, a project created by the team behind Snowpack (be on the lookout for an article about Astro), is now using Vite. Overall, if you want fast, unbundled development, I recommend Vite.

I've been hearing good things about snowpack and have been wanting to give it a go myself as an alternative to webpack/babel

So how did we get here? Well, it's a good thing to describe alternatives considered when you add issues to a repo! Months ago, @0vortex described in Issue #1131 some opportunities for dependency updates that would require version 5 of webpack with our webpack configuration, and warned that the dependency management would probably be tricky. I fixated on an alternative that he mentioned about converting the project to use Snowpack. I had wanted to learn more about bundling tools, so I took a few days here and there after Thanksgiving and got Open Sauced mostly working with it (see PR #1320).

I have written a post about setting up a React project using Parcel as a bundler which can give a more detailed walkthrough about getting a React application up and running from scratch. There are multiple ways to do this but some of the more common build tools include Webpack, Parcel, and Snowpack.

For more information about this issue, check these issue tickets: Issue 2998, Issue 3219, Issue 3243

The number of transforms that Babel is doing with an "evergreen" config ("last 2 browser versions") at this point is effectively miniscule. It's a massive toolchain for what increasing turns out to be a minimal amount of actual work. "Last 2 Browser Versions" is effectively everything through ES2019 at this point which covers almost all of the "modern JS syntax". If you aren't using custom transforms you might not be transforming anything that matters in Babel in 2021. I've seen a bunch of projects with huge Babel pipelines where the only actual transform was Typescript's type removal and at that point, if your codebase is entirely Typescript, Typescript has all the downlevel transforms you need "baked in" (and arguably a little bit cleaner and simpler to Babel's kitchen sink but also still somehow millions of plugins approach) and it's just setting Typescript's compile option to the ES level you are most comfortable with. (In 2021 that may even be as high as { "target": "es2019" } or higher in your tsconfig.json and even there Typescript's not going to even need to downlevel much.) Typescript can also transform TSX/JSX to JS without the need of Babel, if you are using React.

Even ES2015 modules which some people still think is the big reason to keep Babel around: a) has full Browser support if you use type="module", but most people still want to pack their JS because just about no one is assuming HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 yet, and b) Babel has never done module format transforms, that's always been the domain of your packer (webpack, parcel, rollup, snowpack, what have you).

If you are updating your project stack in 2021 right now my personal top recommendation is that I really like the approach of snowpack (https://www.snowpack.dev/): ES2105 modules with dev experience (which is great), great Typescript support, and a simpler overall config experience than most other options right now. (It uses esbuild under the hood rather than babel for dev and basic transforms/bundling. It can optionally piggy back webpack and parcel for Production bundling that needs more "power".) Especially that <script type='module"> dev experience feels great now (with Hot Module Reloading too) versus waiting for a full bundle even for dev builds.

SvelteKit uses Vite under the hood, which is quite surprising, as Sapper and most tools are developed using Snowpack. Vite 2 is framework-agnostic and designed with SSR at its core.

I've had some success with npm, snowpack, mocha, typescript as that sort of stack for more "vanilla" efforts that feel rather more "modern". I think mocha is easier and cleaner than jest. I like keeping all of my transpilation to just Typescript without needing a massive Babel install/pipeline. snowpack (https://www.snowpack.dev/) right now I think is in a sweet spot of a better "ES Module native" developer experience than webpack and has better defaults when left unconfigured. (So much so that while there are snowpack templates/generators provided by the project I mostly don't use them other than for reference.)

Without any adding any dependencies you can connect react props to raw css at runtime with nothing but css variables (aka "custom properties"). If you add CSS modules on top you don't have to worry about affecting the global scope so components created in this way can be truly modular and transferrable. I use this with vite.

Little confused as to why it has vite in it‘s name, it seems unrelated to https://vitejs.dev/

it says in their docs that they recommend Vite https://vitejs.dev/

it goes like this.

1. you create a repo folder, you cd into it.

2. you create a client template using vite which can be plain typescript, or uses frameworks such as react or vue, at https://vitejs.dev/guide/

3. you cd in that client directory, you npm install, then you npm run dev, it should show you that it works at localhost:5173

4. you follow the instructions on your url, you do npm install @web3modal/wagmi @wagmi/core @wagmi/connectors viem

5. you follow the further instructions.

> It seems like this is for npm or yarn to pull from a remote repository maintained by @wagmi for instance. But then what?

you install the wagmi modules, then you import them in your js code, those code can run upon being loaded or upon user actions such as button clicks

> Do I just symlink to the node_modules directory somehow? Use browserify? Or these days I'd use webpack or whatever the cool kids are using these days?

no need for those. browserify is old school way of transpiling commonjs modules into browser-compatible modules. webpack is similar. vite replaces both webpack and browserify. vite also uses esbuild and swc under the hood which replaces babel.

> I totally get how node package management works ... for NODE. But all these client-side JS projects these days have docs that are clearly for the client-side but the ES2015 module examples they show seem to leave out all instructions for how to actually get the files there, as if it's obvious.

pretty much similar actually. except on client-side, you have src and dist folders. when you run "npm run build" vite will compile the src dir into dist dir. the outputs are the static files that you can serve with any http server such as npx serve, or caddy, or anything really.

> What gives? And finally, what exactly does "browserify" do these days, since I think Node supports both ES modules and and CJS modules? I also see sometimes UMD universal modules

vite supports both ecmascript modules and commonjs modules. but these days you'll just want to stick with ecmascript which makes your code consistently use import and export syntax, and you get the extra benefit of it working well with your vscode intellisense.

> In short, I'm a bit confused how to use package management properly with browsers in 2024: https://modern-web.dev/guides/going-buildless/es-modules/

if people want plain js there is unpkg.com and esm.sh way, but the vite route is the best for you as it's recommended and tested by the providers of your modules.

> And finally, if you answer this, can you spare a word about typescript? Do we still need to use Babel and Webpack together to transpile it to JS, and minify and tree-shake, or what?

I recommend typescript, as it gives you better type-safety and better intellisense, but it really depends. If you're new to it, it can slow you down at first. But as your project grows you'll eventually see the value of it. In vite there are options to scaffold your project in pure js or ts.

First you have to know that all those react projects are created using Vite, and for each of them, you need change the vite.config.ts file by adding the following configuration:

CSSHooks works with React, Prereact, Solid.js, and Qwik, and we’re going to use Vite with the React configuration. First, let's create a project called css-hooks and install Vite:

JavaScript React Flowbite Tailwind Firebase - Auth, Database, and Hosting Vite

For this full-stack single-page app, you'll use Vite.js as your frontend build tool and the react-beautiful-dnd package for draggable items.

Vite

Imagine a shiny new React app — that’s what we’ll build! We’ll use a cool tool called Vite to set it up.

Vite is a blazing fast build tool that significantly improves the development experience for React applications. It leverages modern browser features such as native ES module imports to provide near-instantaneous development server startup and rapid hot module replacement (HMR) updates. This makes the development process incredibly smooth and efficient, especially for large-scale projects.