11–20 of 215 posts
How does it compare to esbuild or swc? Its good we have alternatives, and im still mentally scarred from the javascript ecosystem, where almost everything is slow and buggy. But when you compare to an already native tool (like esbuild) you start getting diminishing returns.
This supports all kinds of non-platform-standard features that may tie your project to this specific bundler, but will tie them to bundlers in general. It would be much better to have projects that work without bundlers, that can use them as an optimization step.
As soon as the browser specs catch up to what the bundlers are doing I’d drop them in a heartbeat. Not holding my breath though
The only thing I'm still missing is an offline JSPM/esm.sh.
Rspack (ByteDance) just shipped 1.0. There's Farm too. This is from Ant Group. Major influx of build tools all built in Rust, made in China. Turbopack is supposed to be coming, as a total rebuild of bundling. Rolldown seems solid, as a Rust roll-up redo.
I personally also think about it as a more-likely-to-make-it-to-production Haskell, with how robust the type system, tooling, and other things are (not to rag on Haskell -- it's a fantastic language and there's lots of overlap in the communities).
Unfortunate name collision: https://www.makotemplates.org
Unfortunate name collision: https://www.makotemplates.org
Some competition is a good thing, and it seems to have led to a drive for performance in all these projects which I'm not complaining about, but I wonder if more could be gained by working together. Does every major company or framework need their own bundler?
We already had our bundlers in Java and .NET land, before nodejs came to be, and life was good.
For dev I replaced webpack with "bun vite": it loads scripts ad hoc and is thus super fast at startup, and it still supports hot reloading.
For build I use "bun build". I've created a small script where I don't specify the output folder, but just intercept it, and do some simple search & replace things. It works perfectly, although it's a bit of a hack (simplified code):
const result = await Bun.build({
entrypoints: [srcName],
root: "./",
minify: true,
naming: `${configuratorName}.[hash].[ext]`,
});
for (const r of result.outputs) {
let jsSource = await r.text()
jsSource = jsSource.replaceAll("import.meta.hot","false")
Bun.write(outdir + r.path.substring(1), jsSource);
}
Update:
For the record, the real script also uses the HtmlRewriter from cloudflare (included by default in bun) to alter some basic things in HTML templates as well...
[0] https://bun.sh
Everyone is making the point that using JavaScript on the server was a BIG mistake, with this ongoing rewrites. We already had our bundlers in Java and .NET land, before nodejs came to be, and life was good.