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Now that's a game I wouldn't mind a rewrite of. Imagine Heroes 3 with a modern engine and modding available out of the box instead of people having to reverse engineer it just to keep it alive today.
Seconded.
Mako – fast, production-grade web bundler based on Rust
81–90 of 215 posts
Re: Mako – fast, production-grade web bundler based on Rust
#82I don't work in web, and possibly live under a rock. I'm a little confused around what bundlers actually do? I'd sort of assumed it was a typescript build thing before, but Mako's page gives me enough info to make me realise I'm wrong, but seems to assume people are working with some base knowledge I don't have. Any pointers to information of exactly what bundlers do? The emphasis on speed makes it sound like it's do…
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] whi…
I'll admit to being a little outdated on front-end design evolution. Sass/SCSS is no longer needed? Does CSS support nested blocks now?
Re: Mako – fast, production-grade web bundler based on Rust
#83I don't work in web, and possibly live under a rock. I'm a little confused around what bundlers actually do? I'd sort of assumed it was a typescript build thing before, but Mako's page gives me enough info to make me realise I'm wrong, but seems to assume people are working with some base knowledge I don't have. Any pointers to information of exactly what bundlers do? The emphasis on speed makes it sound like it's do…
Bundling is the equivalent of static linking, typically combined with dead code elimination (which is called "tree shaking" in the web world) plus optionally other optimizations and code transformations.
Dead code elimination is related to but distinct from tree shaking - it also means that unused code branches get removed, for example constants like NODE_ENV get replaced with a static value, and if you have a static condition that always results to true, the else branch is removed.
Re: Mako – fast, production-grade web bundler based on Rust
#84Rspack (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 hadn't heard of any of these, apart from rolldown, thanks!
Hopefully docusaurus gets on that train soon
Re: Mako – fast, production-grade web bundler based on Rust
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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] whi…
I'll admit to being a little outdated on front-end design evolution. Sass/SCSS is no longer needed? Does CSS support nested blocks now?
Yes it does!
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Nesting_sel...
All major browser do now support it. However I still use the PostCSS Nesting plugin:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/postcss-nesting
This lets you write the syntax from the specification but it will be transformed to CSS that still works in older browsers, kind of like a polyfill in js.
Re: Mako – fast, production-grade web bundler based on Rust
#86Unfortunate name collision: https://www.makotemplates.org
It's also a shark. What is your point? I see these droll takes every time someone announces something. Overlaps are going to happen.
Re: Mako – fast, production-grade web bundler based on Rust
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's in the ms for a small projects. These improvements are not to shave a couple ms off some small codebase, but would shave seconds off of really large projects. The codebase I'm working on right now isn't really large, about 5 years of development with on average 2-3 developers working on it and in vite (esbuild) the build time is 20.78 seconds on my M1 MBP. This project claims to be twice as fast as vite, so it w…
I ripped out webpacker and replaced it with esbuild in a big legacy rails app for the front end, probably 2-3 years ago, and its been fantastic and I haven't looked back. It's more or less made front end bundling an afterthought. Going from 3s to 1.5s on my M2 (esbuild to mako) isn't a gamechanger, so for me it feels like it's already getting close to the peak, whatever that might mean. But I was more just asking wha…
A that would be hard to say. A lower limit would be reading your entire project and the dependencies that are used once, and writing the bundled/minified code once. Possibly some parts of that could be done at the same time as you determine the bounds of the dependencies as you read in the code. So O(n) where n is in operations over lines of code in your project at least.
There's probably trade-offs too. Like do you bother with tree shaking to make your end product smaller, or do you not to make your build performance closer to that optimal read-once write-once lower bound.
Re: Mako – fast, production-grade web bundler based on Rust
#88Every bundler these days boasts "Rust" and "fast". What people really want is webpack feature parity. For a large enough organization with complex use cases and resource management, I yet need to see a real webpack equivalent.
(Meanwhile, swc parser can't yet pass all tests in test262 according to their website: https://docs.rs/swc_ecma_parser/latest/swc_ecma_parser/ )
Re: Mako – fast, production-grade web bundler based on Rust
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
You can get pretty far by using importmaps, you would not have treeshaking or a single bundled file, but it works pretty well. JSDoc can be used to add types to your project (that can be typechecked using typescript). I'm currently building a hobby project using preact, htm and jspm for packages. It's pretty nice to just start building without starting a build tool, having to wait for it to finish, make sure it's not…
It works well for a small website. For anything that requires more than a few dependencies, the package management is hell and load time will be insufferable. Also, not everything you grab from npm can just run in the browser even if written in ESM -- things get complicated quickly.
Re: Mako – fast, production-grade web bundler based on Rust
#90I don't work in web, and possibly live under a rock. I'm a little confused around what bundlers actually do? I'd sort of assumed it was a typescript build thing before, but Mako's page gives me enough info to make me realise I'm wrong, but seems to assume people are working with some base knowledge I don't have. Any pointers to information of exactly what bundlers do? The emphasis on speed makes it sound like it's do…
If you are also looking for broader context beyond what a bundler is, I have written a broader exposition on frontend builds here, which may be useful in understanding how bundlers compare to adjacent build tools: https://sunsetglow.net/posts/frontend-build-systems.html.