The Build is Always Broken

Re:The Build is Always Broken by Cthulhu_ on Wednesday January 08, 2020 @04:31AM (#21989838)

I understand where Webpack et al came from, but the more I work with it the less I like it. There used to be a time when the JS I wrote was the exact same that was executed. Now, even in development mode, it gets pulled through several tools (webpack/babel and a heap of their plugins, a minifier, source maps get generated etc) before my changes are visible, even in an incremental / hot reloading build.

It's not just build time, it's the indirectness. I'm seriously contemplating dropping it for a next project and just writing straight JS, whichever dialect (es6?) has the widest adoption.

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Re:The Build is Always Broken by SamBam on Wednesday January 08, 2020 @10:44AM (#21992372)

Which is fine, if you have no need of any dependency management (stick everything in script tags and reference globals), your script is going to be made up of only a few individual .js files (every one has to go in the header), and you have no use for JSX or TypeScript.

For most people working on larger projects, though, the advantages of real dependency management (however broken NPM is) and transpiling JSX or TS is worth the compilation, which you get used to.

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Re:The Build is Always Broken by ratww on Wednesday January 08, 2020 @01:56PM (#21994546)

If you don't need backwards compatibility, you can use ES6 modules directly in the browser [1] and even load NPM packages in module format from Pika or Unpkg.

Living without a bundler was alright.

At my last job we checked Google Analytics and almost 100% of our users were on greenfield browsers, so we moved to that and had no issues.

[1] https://www.sitepoint.com/using-es-modules/

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