Esbuild Alternatives

esbuild reviews and mentions

• ESBuild package gone from NPM registry
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Dec 2024
• Make your Vite applications run a little faster
  12 projects | dev.to | 14 Sep 2024

  Using a more raw toolchain is also a good way to speed things up; the SWC website shows it to be 20 to 70 times faster than Babel, and there are tons of speed advantages in complex real-world applications, which proves that rawness can be a big help in speeding things up. Instead of vite-plugin-react, you can use @vitejs/plugin-react-swc, with LightningCSS instead of PostCSS, SWC or esbuild instead of Babel, etc. etc. to achieve better performance.

• Webpack Performance Tuning: Minimizing Build Times for Large Projects
  18 projects | dev.to | 5 Aug 2024

  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:

• Optimising package size for Typescript AWS Lambda functions using serverless-esbuild
  1 project | dev.to | 18 Jul 2024

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

• Building NPM packages for CommonJS with ESM dependencies
  3 projects | dev.to | 15 Jul 2024

  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.

• Oh CommonJS! Why are you mESMing with me?! Reasons to ditch CommonJS
  3 projects | dev.to | 12 Jul 2024

  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.

• Mako – fast, production-grade web bundler based on Rust
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Jul 2024

  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/

• Farm: Fast vite compatible build tool written in Rust
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Jun 2024

  Indeed!

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

• 5 years in, JavaScript Modules are still painful
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Jun 2024

  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

• Why and How to Migrate Your React App from CRA to Vite
  13 projects | dev.to | 10 Jun 2024

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

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  coderabbit.ai | 10 Dec 2024

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