I thought the same when I read the article. It sounds like it’s just a wrapper around webpack. Why wouldn’t I just use webpack aside from this tool being marginally faster? Is there something I’m missing here? Couldn’t we just take their improvements and implement them in webpack?

The goal is to provide the experience that many other languages have, where you don’t configure anything. You just run “$tool build”

Generally $tool has a config file in the root of the project or similar. Webpack and other js compilers/bundlers are the same.

Webpack works with no configuration as of version 4.

The goal is precisely to not just bundle, but incorporate important optimizations like the V8 Compile Cache (https://github.com/zeit/ncc/issues/51), which is what inspired the project and name to begin with.

Seems like it'd be better as a webpack plugin. It's still not a compiler, by the way, nor a compiler collection, even with this feature included.

It is a compiler. Literally

It seems to me that the compiler here is V8.

One of these things is not like the other.

It’s definitely possible to extract some internals as plugins, but not all currently.

It would make more sense as a collection of plugins, and perhaps exposed as a preset.

But the intent is to precisely remove the extra setup, when all you need to do is publish your Node.js codebase as a single file.

Ncc handles bundling `node_modules`. Your suggestion also introduces problems by not respecting commonjs module boundaries. (They’re akin to function scopes)