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Esbuild – An extremely fast JavaScript bundler

esbuild.github.io

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Re: Esbuild – An extremely fast JavaScript bundler

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that people tend to appear to think it's black magic rather than familiarity with a toolset and a deep understanding of the problem.

That's not all it is. Some people are just better than others. No matter how hard every tries to be the best football or basketball player, only an extremely small set of people even have the chance to make it. There are physical traits they'll never have and mental fortitude to use those traits. You can't grow yourself to 7 ft tall and you never will be able to. What makes you think the brain is any different.

If you take the perspective that some people are "just better" than others, why are we idolizing these people?

Being born with high intelligence and favourable traits is not an achievement.

Re: Esbuild – An extremely fast JavaScript bundler

#252
post #110

Often overlooked things when discussing esbuild here: 1. It's not just a faster replacement for a single %tool_name% in your build chain: for the vast majority of cases, it's the whole "chain" in a single cli command if you're doing it right. That is, you don't just stick it inside, say, webpack as a faster replacement for babel (although you can). No, you look carefully through your webpack configs and its myriad of…

Remember when all of these points applied to webpack, when it was the “single simple fast tool” to replace everyone’s grunt scripts? It seems there’s a feature treadmill at work here where projects inexorably bloat as they get popular. But we tried “compose tools in the Unix way” with grunt too, and that led to spaghetti scripts, unique to each project, that were hard to reason about. I wonder if there is a middle wa…

> Remember when all of these points applied to webpack, when it was the “single simple fast tool” to replace everyone’s grunt scripts?

You're forgetting the 6 months where everyone rewrote everything with Gulp.

Re: Esbuild – An extremely fast JavaScript bundler

#253
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3. The most impressive part about esbuild development is not just that it's one guy writing it: it is the level of support and documentation he manages to provide alongside. And the one guy writing it is Evan Wallace, co-founder and CTO of Figma. I don't know how he has the time!

Figma's tech is mindblowing. Their entire engine is custom-built in C++ : https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-to... > Instead of attempting to get one of [HTML/SVG/JS Canvas] to work, we implemented everything from scratch using WebGL. Our renderer is a highly-optimized tile-based engine with support for masking, blurring, dithered gradients, blend modes, nested layer opacity, and more. All rend…

He seems to like writing code

Re: Esbuild – An extremely fast JavaScript bundler

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that people tend to appear to think it's black magic rather than familiarity with a toolset and a deep understanding of the problem.

Baloney. I don't think it's "black magic", but as a software engineer with some deep familiarity with my tool chain I'm not going to pretend that I could ever be as productive as some of these folks. It's like when I see another post about a Fabrice Bellard project, and I think "he gets done in a year what it would take me about a career". I don't understand this fetishization of "everyone has nearly equal ability" i…

I don't believe everyone has the same ability. What I do believe is that performance is explainable and there's a practical upper limit to raw output.

I made a side project that I spent 1-2years building on and off and had people saying "wow I could never build that". That's bullshit. If they were of similar intelligence and put in a similar amount of time and effort I'm sure they'd be able to replicate what I did.

The luxury of being able to spend ample amounts of time on a project or idea is also massively overlooked.

Re: Esbuild – An extremely fast JavaScript bundler

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not all it is. Some people are just better than others. No matter how hard every tries to be the best football or basketball player, only an extremely small set of people even have the chance to make it. There are physical traits they'll never have and mental fortitude to use those traits. You can't grow yourself to 7 ft tall and you never will be able to. What makes you think the brain is any different.

If you take the perspective that some people are "just better" than others, why are we idolizing these people? Being born with high intelligence and favourable traits is not an achievement.

> If you take the perspective that some people are "just better" than others, why are we idolizing these people?

Good question. Take it up with the people wearing jersey's with Lebron James' and Aaron Rodgers' names on them.

Re: Esbuild – An extremely fast JavaScript bundler

#258
post #110

Often overlooked things when discussing esbuild here: 1. It's not just a faster replacement for a single %tool_name% in your build chain: for the vast majority of cases, it's the whole "chain" in a single cli command if you're doing it right. That is, you don't just stick it inside, say, webpack as a faster replacement for babel (although you can). No, you look carefully through your webpack configs and its myriad of…

The process is cyclical.

Make, Cmake and autoconf offered solutions in this space, but for C/C++.

I do like what esbuild and swc are doing though.

Re: Esbuild – An extremely fast JavaScript bundler

#259
post #110

Often overlooked things when discussing esbuild here: 1. It's not just a faster replacement for a single %tool_name% in your build chain: for the vast majority of cases, it's the whole "chain" in a single cli command if you're doing it right. That is, you don't just stick it inside, say, webpack as a faster replacement for babel (although you can). No, you look carefully through your webpack configs and its myriad of…

Has anyone given you crap for your username? I know you had the username long before MAGA became a popular word in the american lexicon, but I'm still curious!

[deleted]

Re: Esbuild – An extremely fast JavaScript bundler

#260
Well, I spent few days to move large vue.js codebase from webpack 4 to Vite (esbuild). You know what? It isn’t as fast as that benchmarks shows us, even buggy and laggy. So upgraded to webpack 5 with caching to filesystem (I bet no one know) and it became even faster than Vite! I’m happy.
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