Expand? Webpack isn’t the cause of bad bundle times: awful Dependancy Trees are.
Even on an old machine I view bundle times of more than 30 seconds (without minification) as suspicious.
Even on an old machine I view bundle times of more than 30 seconds (without minification) as suspicious.
Browserify does it much more quickly.
Edit: I should say bundler != tranpiler. A bundler may or may not be implemented as a compiler. In the end it's just fancy concatenation and code generation, whereas a transpiler (going from one language to another) requires parsing to an AST
Transpilers are just a word invented to mean compiling one high level language into another.
The thing is, compilers already to that. The "level" of the language is irrelevant, the fundamental concepts are the same.
So compiler works.
It's been used this way since at least 1980 (eg: in 86-DOS there was TRANS.COM)
But there's nothing about webpack that requires an AST, it can use things that do tho.
They can use transpilers (ie, in webpack with babel-loader). But they aren't them.
Yeah I mean possibly, but I'm a programmer, not a javascript tool yak shaver. I want to get work done not learn the ins and outs of "webpack".
Of other tools get me their more quickly and simply then I'm going to use them.
Moreover, the full build times are, at least in my experience with webpack starter packs for side projects and much larger webpack builds at work, only a cost you pay when deploying or setting up a dev environment for the first time. My local dev environments recompile only the parts of the codebase that they need to, and that usually happens quickly enough that it’s ready by the time I go to my browser and refresh.