Webpack has some serious positive side effects:

1-2 times a year when I go to update our app's Webpack, in a matter of 3-4 days I:

1. Get up to date on all recent developments in the world of javascript, babel, esbuild, typescript, eslint, webpack, jest and all their plugins

2. Get the chance to browse through hundreds of fresh github issues while they are still open!

3. Open a few new pull requests

4. Find out about tens of of plugins that are not being developed anymore and their new replacements which are almost the same only with a new name and slightly different API!

5. Give my laptop and build server's CPU's a good go

6. Call my therapist

It's a wonderful opportunity to keep life on edge.

This is too real. I don’t use webpack directly, only the way vue-cli bundles it, but still it’s a sort of blessing and curse. It is also dog slow for what it’s doing: even something like make can cache compilation objects and make sure that for example Bootstrap’s SCSS doesn’t need to be recompiled every time I update the background color of my app in my own stylesheet. And while speed measuring plugins exist, I am still at a loss at how to optimize a build of a simple SPA where my code all in is less than 10KB and yet it takes like 30 seconds to produce a build. And as you say, when a bug hits, good luck figuring that out.

Try esbuild instead of babel. Really helps. There is an esbuild-loader that can replace babel neatly.

On the bright side it’s still possible to make a living shipping professional code with simple script dev tags, for now.

I've been using webpack since v1 and I can't recall having to open pull requests when periodically upgrading it, or its plugins. Webpack 5 + html-webpack-plugin are kind of a mess right now, though. Webpack, in many use cases, needs html-webpack-plugin but there is only an alpha release supporting v5.

The release was rushed by community pressure, and now we have a half-baked upgrade strategy. I would've happily waited another 6-12 months before v5 was released to get major plugins ready first.

:( I just get notifications when my dependences have vulns on github and I update them with pip install -U <package_name>

Ooohhh snarky.... !

I found frontend tranquility in Snowpack and snowpack-rollup for production builds.

Any gotchas? When I read about Snowpack, I always get a too-good-to-be-true feeling. Maybe I'm just jaded by years of grunt, webpack, parcel, etc.

May I ask what is the problem with parcel? I can't remember I have ever run into problems with parcel. Maybe it's because, unlike when using webpack, I never try to perform "dark arts" when using parcel.

I had previously run into the issue of Parcel watching `node_modules` for file changes and inevitably having issues related to that. There are a few issues on GH related to that, to which the devs basically said "that's a feature, not a bug". It's been a while since I used Parcel though, Idk if that's still and issue.

Snowpack got really really slow after I added a few dependencies. Also, it can't reuse its cache between a docker container and my laptop... I was hoping the cache would be portable but it's not. It needed more restarts than webpack. And you give away your freedom to tinker.

For starting from scratch it mist likely does wonders.

Don't try converting a large legacy-ish codebase :)

We love parceljs, too. Check it out.

I like parceljs too. I haven't used it on big projects (plus I'm not a web dev currently) but I found it to be more "config when you need to change the defaults" than "no config". But that's great. It works out of the box for a lot of stuff and you add some dotfiles when you want to customise.

I do want to try snowpack too though.

It's a joke isn't it?! We spend hours maintaining that stuff and it gives the customer 0 value. :explodinghead: But on the flip-side, we get paid! :D

Customer? How about the users? The tools keep getting "better and better" and yet time and again I'm on sites - big major sites - that trigger a "No way! WTF is _that_?!??"

Mind you that's not necessarily a direct result of the tools or those using the tools. On the other hand, resources are finite. Any time used for X (e.g., wresting with Webpack) "comes out of the budget" for Y (e.g., bug fixes) or Z (e.g., a UX designer).

Clients/customers care about their users/end-customers. And users/end-customers don't give a toss about Webpack or anything else. They care about themselves. Full stop.

The tools get better, enabling even more complex applications which occasionally have bugs and unintended features.

This is just in the nature of progress. If any product owner was fine with a simple static website which only displays some text, I'm sure there wouldn't be any noticeable bugs in it.

I think it’s a general truth that all software projects tend to end up at the maximum possible complexity. Projects that aren’t inherently complex tend to achieve this by complicated tooling, deploys, and a slew of “special cases” that inevitably slow things down. It’s a special case of Parkinson’s law (work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion); all these developers need to spend their time on something after all, no-one’s going to code them self out of a job.

Is a goal of `wmr` to ever support translating `exports.foo = bar` / `module.exports.foo = bar` + `require()` to `import/export` so that modules that work with `node.js` can work in the browser too?

It already does this. Only for .cjs files and things in node_modules.