looking at the docs, this uses swc under the hood

SWC doesn't bundle at all. Esbuild is a pretty good bundler but works well only if your code and dependencies use ESM, it's not as good as other options with CommonJS.

That’s not the biggest problem of esbuild. Esbuild has poor support for code splitting (it’s the first priority on their roadmap[1]) and limited plugin interface which makes it a poor choice for complex projects. These are the reasons that Vite for instance can’t use esbuild for production builds.

While I haven’t tried Mako, it seems to have support for advanced code splitting[2]. No idea how powerful its plugin system is.

[1] https://esbuild.github.io/faq/#upcoming-roadmap

[2] https://makojs.dev/docs/features#code-splitting

Also, the vite team in collab with a few others is building https://rolldown.rs/, to replace esbuild and rollup in vite. It's goal is to be faster than esbuild, with extended chunking options and so on.

> Esbuild [...] works well only if your code and dependencies use ESM

I cannot attest to that. We are using Esbuild plus CJS at $DAYJOB no problem. Why would that be an issue?

It's an issue because CommonJS allows stuff that's forbidden in static ESM imports/exports, and it was normal to use. Newer code is usually fine, but there are many older backend libraries that can cause issues with Esbuild. Webpack had to learn how to deal with it because it existed at the time CommonJS was most popular, Esbuild didn't.

This is built on swc, and they compare themselves to vite, which is built on esbuild. So the answer to your question is that they claim to be roughly twice as fast as esbuild (-based bundlers) in the benchmark in this article.

I'm not entirely sure if we can really tell anything about esbuild from that comparison, as vite's production build time is 1300ms (which uses rollup), but dev startup time 1100 (uses esbuild to prebundle). It seems like vite itself has overhead.

The only bench I'm aware of was presented in November 2023: https://x.com/boshen_c/status/1719596594985681275?t=x8FaB9Aw..., where esbuild was faster.

...or Turbopack or RSpack or Rolldown? Too many choices. I will be sitting this round out until a winner emerges.

according the current situation in bundlers written in JS，there is no "really" winner in my opinion。 webpack or rullup，which one is winner is a very personal thought。 So i think there maybe some similar situation in bundlers written in Rust.

Are you Japanese? Those period symbols are interesting.

'。' is a Chinese full stop, equivalent to a period in English

Ah that's cool. So it includes spacing inherently in the character it looks like, rather than English's ". " which are two characters.

Wepack for web apps, rollup for libraries. Very much depends on what you're doing, the tools usually aren't good at all of them. There's 1 or 2 other use cases I'm forgetting.