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

Mako – fast, production-grade web bundler based on Rust

makojs.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 215 posts

Re: Mako – fast, production-grade web bundler based on Rust

#21

Post by ecmascript »

Can't people figure out some other tooling besides bundlers? I mean, how many do we really need?

It's probably fine, but so are all the others as well. The authors have probably spent a fair amount on time on this project so I don't want to be negative but it's just hard to be excited when it brings nothing new to the table.

Why should I use this over Vite or esbuild? Because it's written in Rust? I don't understand why that even matters. Even if it was 10 times faster I wouldn't use it because Vite is fast enough and have all the plugins I would ever need.

Re: Mako – fast, production-grade web bundler based on Rust

#22

Post by berkes »

pjmlp wrote: post #17

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.

The fact that people keep releasing new bundlers, minifiers, transpilers, package managers and so on, for JavaScript is a loud and clear warning that something is amiss.

People (re)write such tools either for fun or to solve a problem (or best: both). Apparently after so much re-writes the problems haven't been solved. To me, this indicates fundamental problems. I'm not familiar enough with the ecosystem to know what those would be, let alone how to truly solve them.

But the very fact that we see new builders, transpilers, bundlers every few months is enough to conclude we aren't solving the problems on the correct level or that maybe it cannot be solved at all. Because otherwise one of the many attempts would've solved the problem and "everyone" would be using that.

Re: Mako – fast, production-grade web bundler based on Rust

#23

Post by pjmlp »

berkes wrote: post #22
pjmlp wrote: post #17

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.

The fact that people keep releasing new bundlers, minifiers, transpilers, package managers and so on, for JavaScript is a loud and clear warning that something is amiss. People (re)write such tools either for fun or to solve a problem (or best: both). Apparently after so much re-writes the problems haven't been solved. To me, this indicates fundamental problems. I'm not familiar enough with the ecosystem to know what…

Definitely, otherwise Netscape LiveWire would have been a huge commercial success.

Re: Mako – fast, production-grade web bundler based on Rust

#24

Post by bilekas »

cjpearson wrote: post #16

The old joke is that there's a new JavaScript framework every month. That's not really true — we've had the same big three for a decade — but there has been an explosion of new bundlers: vite, esbuild, turbopack, farm, swc, rome/biome, rspack, rolldown, mako. And of course plenty of projects are still using rollup and webpack. Some competition is a good thing, and it seems to have led to a drive for performance in al…

Haven't you heard ? Rebuilding everything in rust is the new meta. To be quite honest, call me old fashioned but the fact we need so many bundlers that we are considering which are more performant is a symptom and and not a blessing.

Re: Mako – fast, production-grade web bundler based on Rust

#25

Post by zoul »

pjmlp wrote: post #17

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.

Having the same language on the client and on the server is a huge productivity booster for me. I can’t imagine writing so many things twice again. Have you tried it?

Re: Mako – fast, production-grade web bundler based on Rust

#26

Post by samaltmanfried »

berkes wrote: post #22
pjmlp wrote: post #17

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.

The fact that people keep releasing new bundlers, minifiers, transpilers, package managers and so on, for JavaScript is a loud and clear warning that something is amiss. People (re)write such tools either for fun or to solve a problem (or best: both). Apparently after so much re-writes the problems haven't been solved. To me, this indicates fundamental problems. I'm not familiar enough with the ecosystem to know what…

The situation with the tooling constantly changing isn't nearly as bad as the front-end frameworks themselves. I've been updating my knowledge of front-end, and it's an absolute shambles. The official React documentation(https://react.dev/learn/start-a-new-react-project) is telling me that in order to use their framework, I need to use another framework to solve (quote)"common problems such as code-splitting, routing, data fetching, and generating HTML"... At their suggestion I've picked NextJS, which is a "full-stack" React framework. This means that it has its own back-end which does most of the heavy lifting. So not only will our company have a traditional back-end, we'll also have a BFF (another thing the kids nowadays want), and a back-end that is actually our front-end application. At this point I've forgotten what problem we set out to solve.

NextJS' documentation is also *terrible*. This situation is made all the worse by any material online about NextJS that's more than 3 months old being totally inapplicable because the framework changes so often.

Re: Mako – fast, production-grade web bundler based on Rust

#28

Post by LunaSea »

bilekas wrote: post #24
cjpearson wrote: post #16

The old joke is that there's a new JavaScript framework every month. That's not really true — we've had the same big three for a decade — but there has been an explosion of new bundlers: vite, esbuild, turbopack, farm, swc, rome/biome, rspack, rolldown, mako. And of course plenty of projects are still using rollup and webpack. Some competition is a good thing, and it seems to have led to a drive for performance in al…

Haven't you heard ? Rebuilding everything in rust is the new meta. To be quite honest, call me old fashioned but the fact we need so many bundlers that we are considering which are more performant is a symptom and and not a blessing.

Aren't we doing the same with compilers?

Re: Mako – fast, production-grade web bundler based on Rust

#29

Post by dluan »

What happens when we reach the tip of bundling? Once you're in ms territory (like esbuild is), then what are the really creative things you can do if say every browser had a little WASM mako or some bundler in it?

It's very cool though and seems like a lot of effort went into this.

Re: Mako – fast, production-grade web bundler based on Rust

#30

Post by samaltmanfried »

zoul wrote: post #25
pjmlp wrote: post #17

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.

Having the same language on the client and on the server is a huge productivity booster for me. I can’t imagine writing so many things twice again. Have you tried it?

[dead]
Post reply on HN