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Parcel CSS: A new CSS parser, compiler, and minifier

parceljs.org

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Re: Parcel CSS: A new CSS parser, compiler, and minifier

#41

Post by mikepurvis »

kevincox wrote: post #28
aarchi wrote: post #25

> Parcel CSS is based on the cssparser[0] Rust crate, a browser-grade CSS tokenizer created by Mozilla and used in Firefox. This provides a solid foundation, including tokenization and basic parsing. However, it does not interpret any CSS properties or at rules. That's where Parcel CSS comes in. It handles parsing each individual rule and property value, as well as minification, compilation, and printing back to CSS.…

It's really nice to see browser components being able to be reused easily rather than a bunch of half-assed parsers.

Nice too that it's a compiled language, so you get the end tool in a nice static binary. As a non-Node dev, I hate the experience of hacking on some project and having to install a giant pool of NPM stuff just to run some minifier or linter. Hound is an example of this— the guts of the project are golang, but it has a frontend that uses webpack, jest, etc: https://github.com/hound-search/hound

Which is fine, I guess; definitely use the right tool for the job. And maybe Node developers hate finding my Python projects and needing to set up a virtualenv to run them in. But all the same, I approve a direction where more of this kind of tooling is available without a build-time Node dependency.

Re: Parcel CSS: A new CSS parser, compiler, and minifier

#42

Post by 01acheru »

krono wrote: post #39
no_way wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use Vite instead, it has very nice developer experience. Webpack is a "legacy" bundler, while it is supported, is shouldn't really be used in new projects if you really value your sanity.

Webpack is under active development though, nothing legacy about it as far as I'm aware. Are you referring to abandoned third-party plugins maybe? Vite and all the other bundlers are really awesome, but Webpack's strenght - and I think this may also be the root of the issues you seem to be having with the tool - is that there's almost no magic and barely any handholding. Freedom and reliability at the cost of having…

> it's just dumping plugin config objects in an array, really not difficult

Until you eject a CRA :)

Re: Parcel CSS: A new CSS parser, compiler, and minifier

#43

Post by no_wizard »

This is amazing! Seen a lot of work around Rust and JS / JSX / TS / TSX (notably SWC[0] is moving to be a Rust based version of Babel) not so much around CSS.

My genunine hope is this will replace PostCSS sooner rather than later. PostCSS isn't the most performant thing I've worked with, and a lot of plugins for PostCSS rely on doing multiple passes at the AST, they can slow down significantly as a result

For that however, we will need some kind of plugin system. I know the SWC[0] project has had some struggles with this as their current JS API relies on serializing the AST back and forth. I wonder if this forgoes a JS API entirely or if that is something planned for say 1.5?

[0]: https://swc.rs/

Re: Parcel CSS: A new CSS parser, compiler, and minifier

#44

Post by ReleaseCandidat »

TameAntelope wrote: post #16

I was just looking at Parcel a week or so ago to replace the stagnated Snowpack project for our frontend. Should I just stop trying to avoid it and just use Webpack 5, or can I actually rely on Parcel in a way I couldn't Snowpack? I just want to bundle my React app, I'm not trying to do anything special...

I used Parcel for about a week a month ago. Couldn't get the HTTPS server to use my certificate and key and would have needed to write a plugin so that it wouldn't rename favicons and delete files not mentioned in the HTML file.

So, Esbuild for 'no configuration' as it is significantly faster than Parcel and Webpack for more complex stuff.

Re: Parcel CSS: A new CSS parser, compiler, and minifier

#45

Post by pferdone »

no_way wrote: post #20
TameAntelope wrote: post #16

I was just looking at Parcel a week or so ago to replace the stagnated Snowpack project for our frontend. Should I just stop trying to avoid it and just use Webpack 5, or can I actually rely on Parcel in a way I couldn't Snowpack? I just want to bundle my React app, I'm not trying to do anything special...

Use Vite instead, it has very nice developer experience. Webpack is a "legacy" bundler, while it is supported, is shouldn't really be used in new projects if you really value your sanity.

I seriously don't get the hatred Webpack receives. Calling it legacy when it introduced stuff like module federation is unfair to say the least. Just because a lot of people use CRA or some "zero config" bundler, or because esbuild etc are picking up momentum, doesn't mean it's bad. The documentation is actually really good IMO.

Re: Parcel CSS: A new CSS parser, compiler, and minifier

#46

Post by krono »

01acheru wrote: post #42
krono wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Webpack is under active development though, nothing legacy about it as far as I'm aware. Are you referring to abandoned third-party plugins maybe? Vite and all the other bundlers are really awesome, but Webpack's strenght - and I think this may also be the root of the issues you seem to be having with the tool - is that there's almost no magic and barely any handholding. Freedom and reliability at the cost of having…

> it's just dumping plugin config objects in an array, really not difficult Until you eject a CRA :)

Which is the cherry on top for those types of self-chastisement fetishists who willingly put themselves at the mercy of CRA ;-)

Re: Parcel CSS: A new CSS parser, compiler, and minifier

#47

Post by armchairhacker »

nawgz wrote: post #32
TameAntelope wrote: post #16

I was just looking at Parcel a week or so ago to replace the stagnated Snowpack project for our frontend. Should I just stop trying to avoid it and just use Webpack 5, or can I actually rely on Parcel in a way I couldn't Snowpack? I just want to bundle my React app, I'm not trying to do anything special...

Snowpack, ESBuild, ..., all promised us nice frontend compiles, yet I still turn to Webpack every time I actually want everything to work - you always hit roadblocks you can't solve in these other tools. That'd be my recommendation to you, still, sadly.

I recommend Vite. I use ESBuild in some libraries but it has a learning curve. Vite's experience is similar to Webpack.

Re: Parcel CSS: A new CSS parser, compiler, and minifier

#48

Post by devongovett »

no_wizard wrote: post #43

This is amazing! Seen a lot of work around Rust and JS / JSX / TS / TSX (notably SWC[0] is moving to be a Rust based version of Babel) not so much around CSS. My genunine hope is this will replace PostCSS sooner rather than later. PostCSS isn't the most performant thing I've worked with, and a lot of plugins for PostCSS rely on doing multiple passes at the AST, they can slow down significantly as a result For that ho…

Hi, author of Parcel CSS here.

I have been thinking about implementing the CSS OM spec as the JS API. This is the same API that browsers expose for manipulating stylesheets. The advantage of this is that we don't need to invent something custom. Still thinking through options. https://github.com/parcel-bundler/parcel-css/issues/5

That said, I think I'd want to keep the use cases for JS plugins limited, because it will affect performance significantly. So, if it's something that exists in an official CSS spec somewhere (even if draft), or a really common transformation, it should be implemented in Rust. An example of this is the support for the CSS nesting spec. Ideally, we'd try to keep the amount of custom syntax being invented around CSS to a minimum and stick to standard CSS syntax wherever possible though.

Re: Parcel CSS: A new CSS parser, compiler, and minifier

#49

Post by andrei_says_ »

devongovett wrote: post #48
no_wizard wrote: post #43

This is amazing! Seen a lot of work around Rust and JS / JSX / TS / TSX (notably SWC[0] is moving to be a Rust based version of Babel) not so much around CSS. My genunine hope is this will replace PostCSS sooner rather than later. PostCSS isn't the most performant thing I've worked with, and a lot of plugins for PostCSS rely on doing multiple passes at the AST, they can slow down significantly as a result For that ho…

Hi, author of Parcel CSS here. I have been thinking about implementing the CSS OM spec as the JS API. This is the same API that browsers expose for manipulating stylesheets. The advantage of this is that we don't need to invent something custom. Still thinking through options. https://github.com/parcel-bundler/parcel-css/issues/5 That said, I think I'd want to keep the use cases for JS plugins limited, because it wil…

Does this include dart scss processing?

Re: Parcel CSS: A new CSS parser, compiler, and minifier

#50

Post by samhuk »

TameAntelope wrote: post #16

I was just looking at Parcel a week or so ago to replace the stagnated Snowpack project for our frontend. Should I just stop trying to avoid it and just use Webpack 5, or can I actually rely on Parcel in a way I couldn't Snowpack? I just want to bundle my React app, I'm not trying to do anything special...

I have been using esbuild for a while, and I can say that it's looking like a huge improvement over webpack, snowpack, vite, etc.

I made a web app starter that uses esbuild to bundle a react-redux app [0] and my experience was very positive of the bundler.

[0] https://github.com/samhuk/tree-starter

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