The Three Pillars of JavaScript Bloat

Re:The Three Pillars of JavaScript Bloat by hsbauauvhabzb on Saturday March 21, 2026 @11:37PM (#47474232)

I’ve been very lost trying to understand the ecosystem between es versions , typescript and everything else. It ends up being a weird battle between seemingly unrelated things like require() vs import vs async when all I want to do is compile. All while I’m utterly confused by all the build tools, npm vs whatever other ones are out there, vite vs whatever other ones are out there, ‘oh babel? I’ve heard the name but no idea what it does’ ends up being my position on like 10 build packages.

This isn’t the desire of people to build legacy support, it’s a broken, confusing and haphazard build system built on the corpses of other broken, confusing and haphazard build systems.

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Re:The Three Pillars of JavaScript Bloat by conartist6 on Sunday March 22, 2026 @12:29AM (#47474470)

Yes, yes to all of that, but there is still hope.

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Re:The Three Pillars of JavaScript Bloat by hsbauauvhabzb on Sunday March 22, 2026 @01:09AM (#47474663)

This fancy new build tool with emojis will fix it!

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Re:The Three Pillars of JavaScript Bloat by kennywinker on Sunday March 22, 2026 @01:17AM (#47474703)

This fancy new vibe coded build tool with emojis

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Re:The Three Pillars of JavaScript Bloat by hsbauauvhabzb on Sunday March 22, 2026 @04:32AM (#47475544)

Built in rust

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Re:The Three Pillars of JavaScript Bloat by conartist6 on Sunday March 22, 2026 @08:25AM (#47476801)

Mmmmhm. But not all the people building devtools got distracted by a pretty butterfly.

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Re:The Three Pillars of JavaScript Bloat by CoderLuii on Sunday March 22, 2026 @01:05AM (#47474641)

this is exactly where i landed too. i build docker images that bundle node tooling and every time i think i understand the build system something changes. require vs import, cjs vs esm, babel vs swc vs esbuild, then half your dependencies use one format and half use the other. the worst part is when you containerize it because now you need it all to work in a clean linux environment with no cached state and suddenly half the assumptions break.

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Re:The Three Pillars of JavaScript Bloat by anematode on Sunday March 22, 2026 @01:56AM (#47474848)

Honestly, Vite is all you need. :) It's super flexible compared to the status quo of require vs. import etc. For example, I recently wanted to ship a WASM binary along with the JS rather than making it a separate download (to avoid having to deal with the failure case of the JS code loading and the WASM not fetching). All I had to do was import `a.wasm?url` and it did the base64 embedding and loading automatically.

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Re:The Three Pillars of JavaScript Bloat by Maxion on Sunday March 22, 2026 @02:25AM (#47474975)

This sentiment is all well and good, but when you end up in a new-to-you JS codebase with a list of deps longer than a Costco receipt using some ancient Webpack with it's config split into 5 or so files, then no-one is letting you upgrade to vite unless the site is completely down.

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Re:The Three Pillars of JavaScript Bloat by anematode on Sunday March 22, 2026 @02:48AM (#47475068)

Sad but true...

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Re:The Three Pillars of JavaScript Bloat by tankenmate on Sunday March 22, 2026 @07:59AM (#47476613)

It's almost like Churchill's quip "He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire". In other words, in some ways the JS ecosystem rushes to all the tech debt inducing "shiny shiny" and avoids all the tech debt reducing "hard work of refactoring and wisdom". It's almost like a large chunks of the JS ecosystem thrives on "the dopamine hit". Santayana's wisdom whispers behind every import.

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