A new generation of JS bundlers that use modern browser’s native ESM support promise to be much faster than the Webpack/Rollup style bundlers; They seem to be getting a lot of traction / tweets of late (search twitter)

Snowpack: https://snowpack.dev
HMR for Svelte mentioned in the Readme, which makes it a winner for me!

npx create-snowpack-app --template @snowpack/app-template-svelte new-folder

“Snowpack is a faster build tool for modern web apps. Snowpack leverages ESM imports in your application to remove unnecessary bundling work during development. The end result is a build tool that starts up instantly and wastes no time rebuilding on every change. See changes reflected in the browser instantly.”

Other contenders:

esbuild: https://github.com/evanw/esbuild

Vite: https://github.com/vitejs/vite

  • Native-ESM powered web dev build tool. It’s fast. “
  • By vuejs
  • HMR for React, Preact, Vue. Svelte not mentioned…

Kinda related:

Sucrase (https://www.npmjs.com/package/sucrase) is like babel-lite; smaller scope, assumes modern browsers, upto 20x faster than babel and typescript. Instead of ts-node index.ts, try running sucrase-node index.ts.

Deno takes some inspiration from Go and pulls deps directly from GitHub without npm (or a package manager). I have yet to wrap my head around it … but conceptually I like the idea that a deno script is a “single” file rather than a pile of files. OTOH, PHP’s phar never gained as much traction … I mean when was the last time you downloaded a “cli script” that was actually a phar? Also deno is uses typescript natively.

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