Modern Web Bundlers in 2023

Web bundlers have become an essential tool for modern web development. As web applications have become more complex, the number of JavaScript files required to create them has increased exponentially, leading to longer loading times and poor performance. Web bundlers help solve this problem by bundling multiple JavaScript files into a single file, reducing the number of network requests and improving performance.

Additionally, web bundlers can also process other types of files, such as CSS and images, allowing developers to manage all of their application assets in a single place. They have become a standard part of the web development toolchain, and are used by developers of all skill levels to build fast, efficient web applications.

• Vite (58k ⭐) — A frontend tooling that provides a fast and lean development experience for modern web projects. It consists of a dev server that serves files over native ES modules, and a build command that bundles the code with Rollup. Vite is designed to be simple and easy to use, with sensible defaults and minimal configuration.

• Webpack (63.3k ⭐) — An open-source JavaScript module bundler that is used to bundle JavaScript code and other assets such as images, CSS, and fonts into a format that can be executed in a browser. Webpack was created by Tobias Koppers and was first released in 2012. It has since become one of the most popular bundlers in the web development community.

• Parcel (42.4k ⭐) — An open-source web bundler that was first released in 2017. It is designed to be a simple and easy-to-use tool for bundling web apps. Parcel is known for its zero configuration approach, which means that it can automatically detect and bundle all assets and dependencies without requiring any configuration from the developer.

• Esbuild (35.7k ⭐) — An open-source JavaScript bundler and minifier that is designed to be extremely fast and lightweight. It was created by Evan Wallace and was first released in 2020. ESBuild is written in Go and is designed to be highly parallelized, making use of all available CPU cores to optimize the build process.

• SWC (28k ⭐) — A Rust-based platform for the web that provides fast and powerful tools for JavaScript and TypeScript development. It can be used for compilation, bundling, minification, transformation, and more. It is used by popular frameworks and tools such as Next.js, Parcel, and Deno.

• Rollup (23.7k ⭐) — An open-source JavaScript module bundler that is used to bundle JavaScript code into a format that can be executed in a browser. Rollup was created by Rich Harris and was first released in 2015. Rollup is designed to be highly configurable and customizable, making it a popular choice among developers who need a flexible tool for bundling their JavaScript code.

Common features

Web bundlers typically offer a range of features that help optimize the performance and organization of web applications. Some common features of web bundlers include:

• Bundling of multiple files: combining and optimizing different types of files, such as JavaScript, CSS, HTML, images, fonts, etc., into a single or a few output files that can be easily delivered to the web browser. Bundling helps to improve the performance and efficiency of web applications by reducing the number of requests, file sizes, and loading times.
• Support for modular code: support modular code organization, allowing developers to write code in separate modules and import them as needed.
• Code optimization: include tools for optimizing and compressing code, which can improve performance and reduce file size.
• Hot module replacement (HMR): allows developers to see changes in their code reflected in real-time without having to manually refresh the page.
• Tree-shaking: identify and remove unused code from the final bundle, reducing the size of the bundle and improving performance.
• Source maps: allow developers to debug and analyze code even after it has been bundled and minified.

What’s the hype with Vite

Vite is a next-generation web bundler that leverages the power of native ES modules to deliver a fast and efficient development experience.

Unlike traditional bundlers that have to process and bundle the entire application before serving it to the browser, Vite only transforms and serves the modules that are actually requested by the browser on demand. This way, it can achieve near-instant server start, lightning-fast hot module replacement (HMR), and on-demand compilation.

Vite also pre-bundles the dependencies of the application using esbuild, a bundler written in Go that is 10-100x faster than JavaScript-based bundlers. This significantly reduces the initial loading time of the application and avoids unnecessary work during development. Vite supports various module formats, such as ESM, CommonJS, and UMD, and automatically converts them to ESM for optimal performance.

Vite is not only fast, but also feature-rich and extensible. It supports a wide range of web development frameworks, such as Vue, React, Preact, Lit, and Svelte, and provides sensible defaults for each of them. It also has a plugin API that allows developers to customize and enhance the functionality of Vite with ease. For example, there are plugins for TypeScript support, CSS pre-processors, GraphQL, WebAssembly, and more.

When it comes to production build, Vite uses Rollup as its underlying bundler, which is optimized for tree-shaking and code-splitting. Vite also applies various optimizations to the output bundle, such as minification, hashing, compression, and brotli compression. Vite can also generate legacy bundles for older browsers that do not support native ES modules using the official @Vite/plugin-legacy plugin.

Vite is a modern and innovative web bundler that aims to make web development faster, easier, and more enjoyable. It is designed for the future of web development and embraces the latest standards and technologies.

If you are looking for a web bundler that can boost your productivity and performance, you should definitely give Vite a try.