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Comment by emilsedgh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.... !

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