31–40 of 215 posts
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…
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.
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.
One of my favourite features is probably that it understands a tsconfig file: https://rsbuild.dev/config/source/tsconfig-path
I've recently taken a legacy Typescript clientside codebase that was using webpack to generate tens of js packages from minutes to seconds by using bun [0] for both dev and build: 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, bu…
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…
Also note that the Vite team is writing Rolldown[3], and guest what? They are writing it in Rust.
[0] https://crates.io/search?q=deno [1] https://crates.io/search?q=oxc [2] https://crates.io/search?q=biome [3] https://rolldown.rs
Unfortunate name collision: https://www.makotemplates.org
And https://wayland.emersion.fr/mako/
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Thinking about it only recently, Go fits in nicely with fast compile times for ' 'builders' esbuild comes to mind. But Rust.. Crazy