xgboost-node VS esbuild

This chips away at one of the showstoppers for Deno for me, which is good.

But while "the vast majority" of npm packages don't require a gyp build step for native addons, some of those modules are pretty important, and I see no indication in the announcement that they're also going to be implementing the Node C API or the gyp build process.

Right now I'm working with a machine learning project, and XGBoost [0] is a direct Node.js extension [1] through the binary interface.

So this does bring things a step closer to being generally usable, but there are still significant roadblocks.

A WebAssembly build of XGBoost could work with Deno, but aside from some guy's unsupported side project/proof-of-concept for use in a browser, I'm not seeing an XGBoost WebAssembly build. And generally when deploying something like a machine learning model I'd rather use well-supported tools than to need to dive into the rabbit hole of maintaining my own.

And yes, XGBoost will likely eventually have that kind of support for Deno, but then the next bleeding-edge project will come along and only support Node.

Even assuming Deno eventually hits a tipping point in popularity where everyone wants to release Node _and_ Deno support in their bleeding-edge projects, there are still things that I miss from package.json that don't seem to exist in the Deno ecosystem.

Things like the "scripts" block: A nice centralized place to find all of the things that need to be done to a project, plus auto-run script entries that can trigger when a project is installed. And inheritable, overridable dependency maps (see the yarn "resolutions" block).

I'd love to jump into Deno, but I think there has been far too much "baby thrown out with the bathwater" to its design. It's the classic development problem of looking at a system and seeing a ton of complexity, but not really understanding that all of that complexity was there for a reason. Maybe when it re-evolves 80% of Node's and npm's features I'll be convinced to make the jump. I'm a huge TypeScript fan after all. But it still strikes me as a violation of "As simple as possible, but no simpler."

[0] XGBoost is a _very_ promising approach to machine learning, training models much faster and with much more accuracy than traditional approaches.

[1] https://github.com/nuanio/xgboost-node

During my search for deploying Lambdas via GitHub actions, I came across a tutorial that utilized ncc for converting TypeScript and bundling. While ncc is effective, I discovered esbuild, which proved to be significantly faster and perfectly suited to my requirements.

The advent of esbuild, the native support for ES Modules in browsers, the widespread adoption of import map, the emergence of tools like Native Federation, and the Nx ecosystem all combine to forge a flexible and well-maintained Micro Frontend Architecture.

EsBuild is a relatively new, blazing-fast JavaScript bundler and minifier. It stands out for its high performance, significantly speeding up the build process in development pipelines.

Unlike Webpack, the Vite DevServer only compiles files when they are requested. It leverages ES module imports, which allow JS files to import other files without needing to bundle them together during development. When one file changes, only that file needs to be re-compiled, and the rest can remain unchanged. Project files are compiled with Rollup.js. Third-party dependencies in node_modules are pre-compiled using the ultra-fast esbuild bundler for maximum speed, and they are cached until the dependency version changes. Vite also provides a client script for hot module reloading.

Use esbuild to build the React code into a form executable on both the server and client sides.

The functions will bundle using esbuild. For that, it is required to install esbuild globally:

TSX is the newest and most improved version of our ts-node, using ESBuild to transpile TS files to JS very quickly. The most interesting part is that TSX was developed to be a complete replacement for Node, so you can actually use TSX as a TypeScript REPL, if you install it globally with npm i -g tsx, just run tsx in your terminal and you can write TSX natively. But what's even cooler is that you can load TSX for all TypeScript files using --loader tsx when you run your file. For example, let's say we have this file called index.ts:

esbuild plus Vite is out of developer preview and enabled by default, yielding 67%, 87%, 80% speed improvements for build time, hybrid build time and hybrid serve time respectively.

Bundling with esbuild

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.