Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Writing JavaScript without a build system

jvns.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 187 posts

Re: Writing JavaScript without a build system

#141

Post by donkeybeer »

noahtallen wrote: post #124
bernardv wrote: post #6

All those extraneous elements to Javascript are a real turn-off. Python: batteries mostly included. Javascript: feels like you need to drag a dozen suitcases along anytime you embark on any non-trivial project.

Frankly, if you're just writing a local CLI tool with Node, it's not really an issue. Most of the build tool features listed in the article aren't needed for a local JS runtime. Node is even getting a built-in testing framework, and Deno can run Typescript without an intermediate step! Build tools for JS solve problems that other languages don't have to worry about. You can't use Python (directly) in a browser which…

Platform compatibility is much easier in web compared to python or anything else native. You only have the browser to worry about and nothing else, and the variation between browsers is there but much less than the variations between cpu architectures, oses, languages etc in native apps. The variation between the two biggest ones, firefox and chrome is even narrower yet we still get "only works in chrome" or worse bundling an entire copy of a very specific version of chrome along with your app in for example Electron.

Re: Writing JavaScript without a build system

#143

Post by tgv »

spankalee wrote: post #45

If anyone's looking for something like a framework that works with buildless workflows you might check out the project I work on: Lit ( https://lit.dev ) Lit gives you reactive components, declarative HTML templates, runtime encapsulated DOM and styles, interoperability with frameworks and HTML via web components, and a lot more - with no required build tools at all. We take great care to make sure our libraries are…

> ... we're the only ones that fully work with plain JS

Vue (v2, don't know about v3) can also work without a build script, either with a render function, or a "template" (an string that mixes HTML with expressions).

Re: Writing JavaScript without a build system

#144

Post by tomstuart »

mhd wrote: post #49

It seems just a few years ago when I was testing out an early version of react, and it had the JSX compiler as a header include. Worked well enough, and with more modern JS supported by default, I wouldn't mind a newer version of this. Instead of the increasingly silly attempts of coming up with weirder ways of doing server side rendering.

The newer (or perhaps still the same!) version of this is to add `babel-standalone` to the page [0] and put the `type="text/babel"` attribute on any `` tags where you want to use JSX.

[0] https://reactjs.org/docs/add-react-to-a-website.html#quickly...

Re: Writing JavaScript without a build system

#145

Post by [deleted] »

mtlynch wrote: post #87
spankalee wrote: post #45

If anyone's looking for something like a framework that works with buildless workflows you might check out the project I work on: Lit ( https://lit.dev ) Lit gives you reactive components, declarative HTML templates, runtime encapsulated DOM and styles, interoperability with frameworks and HTML via web components, and a lot more - with no required build tools at all. We take great care to make sure our libraries are…

I've been looking for a modern JS library that doesn't require a build step, and I've always skipped over Lit because I thought it depended on a build until this comment. Is there any documentation about using it without a build? All the documentation and tutorials seem to assume a build step. I've found several different "getting started" entrypoints on the site, and they all begin with "npm install" and "import {Li…

[deleted]

Re: Writing JavaScript without a build system

#146

Post by Juliennng »

benforreal wrote: post #50
kyle-rb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for Lit. It seems like they're mostly recommending that you use TypeScript and a build system, but you can 100% still just pull the library from a CDN with native JS modules [0]. It leans into a lot of the web components spec so the library is pretty small, and the templating system is just ES6 tagged template literals parsed by the browser's DOM parser and any embedded variables are updated dynamically [1]. [0] h…

I think Lit is still recommending using web dev server ( https://modern-web.dev/docs/dev-server/overview/ ), which no, its not a build system, but still a bit of a departure from a simple web server. And that's only needed to resolve imports that aren't a full relative path (like if I want to import Lit, I don't have to do import node_modules/lit/whatever). Someone else mentioned import maps here, and it's now suppor…

Hopefully, the "Type Syntax in JavaScript" proposal is accepted one day, and you don't have to transpile ts => js anymore.

Re: Writing JavaScript without a build system

#147

Post by nicbou »

tgv wrote: post #143
spankalee wrote: post #45

If anyone's looking for something like a framework that works with buildless workflows you might check out the project I work on: Lit ( https://lit.dev ) Lit gives you reactive components, declarative HTML templates, runtime encapsulated DOM and styles, interoperability with frameworks and HTML via web components, and a lot more - with no required build tools at all. We take great care to make sure our libraries are…

> ... we're the only ones that fully work with plain JS Vue (v2, don't know about v3) can also work without a build script, either with a render function, or a "template" (an string that mixes HTML with expressions).

Correct. It's how I use it. I think that it no longer applies with V3.

Re: Writing JavaScript without a build system

#148

Post by [deleted] »

mtlynch wrote: post #87
spankalee wrote: post #45

If anyone's looking for something like a framework that works with buildless workflows you might check out the project I work on: Lit ( https://lit.dev ) Lit gives you reactive components, declarative HTML templates, runtime encapsulated DOM and styles, interoperability with frameworks and HTML via web components, and a lot more - with no required build tools at all. We take great care to make sure our libraries are…

I've been looking for a modern JS library that doesn't require a build step, and I've always skipped over Lit because I thought it depended on a build until this comment. Is there any documentation about using it without a build? All the documentation and tutorials seem to assume a build step. I've found several different "getting started" entrypoints on the site, and they all begin with "npm install" and "import {Li…

[deleted]

Re: Writing JavaScript without a build system

#149

Post by quectophoton »

rcarmo wrote: post #142

So much this. I using Preact and still have to manually fish out files from build folders in Git repos just to have a usable library to import directly, because somehow “npm install” became the status quo.

Same situation here, but Mithril.js instead of Preact.

For small personal projects I just use git submodules[1] and symlinks, and I still haven't regretted it.

Maybe it's because I set `submodule.recurse true` and `push.recurseSubmodules check`, but I still haven't found the reason why they get so much hate. I started using them (only on personal projects) partly to find out by myself what all that was about.

For $DAYJOB I obviously go with what's mainstream and "best practices", but on personal projects I try to experiment and challenge assumptions to see how much I can simplify stuff, and what decisions I come to regret 6 months down the line.

I either learn that some things are not as bad as others say; or I learn more about the specific pains caused by not following some advice (so I'll have more context on when it shouldn't be applied).

[1]: Pointing to my own mirrors. Because not owning your dependencies is a recipe for disaster.

Re: Writing JavaScript without a build system

#150

Post by axilmar »

The real question is why do we need React, Webpack, Tailwind, sass, jsx, etc.

I've been developing web apps for the last few years and I really can't understand why all these are needed. They do not make my life easier as a developer, nor they make the code more readable.

I've asked around why do we need, for example, React, and never gotten a straight answer.

Post reply on HN