The scope is even broader! Webpack is just a bundler. Rome is a bundler, linter, test runner, typescript compiler, and formatter. The proper comparison would be Webpack + ESLint + Jest + TSC + Prettier.

Thank you!

So, this is a bundler with built in plugins?

Is there is a way to add Babel etc, that I would have used with Webpack? Does it handle CSS?

And why would I prefer this over that chain (simpler to set up? Trust in Facebook over the people at js.foundation?)

The standard stack is unnecessarily complex and very difficult to security-audit. By not having any third-party dependencies, you don't need to trust thousands of individual developers to not have their NPM accounts compromised or to push something with a subtle security bug.

The selling point is that you don't need plugins at all. Rome is the entire toolchain in one tool. For example, you don't need to add Babel because Rome handles transpilation.

The question is - will Rome perform as well as all the tools it intends to replace. Can it be a better Babel than Babel is? (There's a good chance it could since the creator of Rome is the creator of Babel)

I would bet on it performing better too, since Webpack/Babel/ESLint/TSC/Terser/Prettier all have to parse/process/pretty-print the code, using Javascript as the intermediate representation between each tool. That's very wasteful.

With a unified tool you can use a single AST. Or even better: an intermediate representation. You only need to parse and pretty-print once.

It does not handle CSS, JavaScript only

I've been using fuse-box for a while, and am not sure I could be much happier. It's a bundler with big dreams, but mostly it's just really fast and the devs are responsive.