Surprised to not see esbuild in the comparison chart
Mako: Fast, production-grade web bundler
11–20 of 38 posts
Re: Mako: Fast, production-grade web bundler
#12Mako is also a Python templating library. I have used Mako primarily since it was what reddit used to use back in 2016. Not sure if reddit still uses it.
The Shortfin Mako is the fastest shark. The Sailfish (and maybe Black Marlin depending on who you believe) is faster.
It's also just a common Japanese girl's name.
Needs a comparison to Vite/esbuild though. The docs only mention Webpack, but idk who's using Webpack on new projects in 2025. There's a benchmark that includes Vite on the homepage, but that's not gonna be enough to get me to switch to a newcomer with a smaller community unless there's some usability difference too.
The CSS support also needs a comparison to LightningCSS (which Vite also supports and has some advantages over esbuild), especially when it comes to bleeding-edge features like view transitions and nesting.
Re: Mako: Fast, production-grade web bundler
#13I wasn't sure what "based on Rust" meant and looking at the announcement / GitHub etc I think they just mean that it's built in Rust. I couldn't find any commentary on or comparison to the rust language or tooling etc
I find all these "based on Rust" and "written in Rust" announcements ridiculous. Which programming language is entirely irrelevant to an end-user.
Re: Mako: Fast, production-grade web bundler
#14I wasn't sure what "based on Rust" meant and looking at the announcement / GitHub etc I think they just mean that it's built in Rust. I couldn't find any commentary on or comparison to the rust language or tooling etc
I find all these "based on Rust" and "written in Rust" announcements ridiculous. Which programming language is entirely irrelevant to an end-user.
Rust signals fast, modern, and correct. It's absolutely a badge.
You should give the language a try when you've got a spare weekend.
Re: Mako: Fast, production-grade web bundler
#15What I want is one of these bundlers and typescript compilers that are written in Rust to be runnable programmatically from e.g. a Cargo build.rs or within a web server in Rust.
I don't want to install your binary separately, and I don't want to use NPM for my project. I want to use my existing build system, and if you wrote it in Rust, it should be made to fit nicely into the Rust ecosystem.
Re: Mako: Fast, production-grade web bundler
#16There are so many solid web bundlers that all offer a similar feature set, I am pretty skeptical that another entry is all that beneficial. It's good to have choices, but it's become difficult to keep up with such a fragmented ecosystem. I also admit that I am biased. I started using vite a couple years ago and since then have never run into any serious issues with my frontend builds/developer experience. If the main benefit of another tool is marginal performance gains, I am thoroughly uninterested.
Re: Mako: Fast, production-grade web bundler
#17There are so many solid web bundlers that all offer a similar feature set, I am pretty skeptical that another entry is all that beneficial. It's good to have choices, but it's become difficult to keep up with such a fragmented ecosystem. I also admit that I am biased. I started using vite a couple years ago and since then have never run into any serious issues with my frontend builds/developer experience. If the main…
> It's good to have choices, but it's become difficult to keep up with such a fragmented ecosystem.
I feel this way not only about bundlers, frameworks, languages, etc. but also about Linux/BSD distributions. What about you?
Re: Mako: Fast, production-grade web bundler
#18If you use vanilla JS modules you can get away with no bundlers at all which greatly simplifies web projects. import statements "just work" in browsers, and caching of shared modules means you don't need fancy things like chunking. Also no need for map files and such, just debug directly in browser.
Vanilla TS also works well if you use a server side translator like esbuild to strip out the types before serving the files in a middleware (especially if you are using a golang backend, esbuild is trivial to integrate as a middleware)
Re: Mako: Fast, production-grade web bundler
#19Surprised to not see esbuild in the comparison chart
They seem to be measuring things like how long it takes for the dev server to spin up, and how long HMR updates take. I don't think ESBuild offers these features out of the box. I guess it could be in the "Cold build" chart. AFAIK Vite uses ESBuild at least for some of its building, though. node_modules, dev builds maybe. Not sure if it was used in this benchmark or not.
Re: Mako: Fast, production-grade web bundler
#20Damn for a moment I thought this was about Marko (the frontend framework by Ebay).
They've been teasing v6 for years now.