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Comment by no_wizard | Hacker News Reader

I would like parcel much more if they just emitted ES Modules. I don’t understand the logic of having their own loader in 2020. Same complaint I have with webpack. Just target systemJS for older browsers like rollup does. Leveraging a very efficient existing well tested solution seems wiser to me than reinventing the wheel

I don’t understand why they don’t support that. You can really leverage smaller bundles this way (no bundler runtime for modern browsers for one). You can also leverage type=module in the browser (which parsers more efficiently by default[0]) and use the nomodule attribute for differential loading.

Of course this assumes browser targets, which I feel like is the main target for these tools most of the time.

[0] https://v8.dev/features/modules

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One could also ask why you'd need parcel if you're already writing modern es module code. If you really need to bundle that (and you kind of don't, es modules allows you to put each requirement in your page html, and get the benefit of browser caching for individual pieces of the pie back, which you lost when you starting bundling and single-line changes to a single small class created entirely new hundreds-of-kbs bundles) use rollup.

If you know you're targeting modern browsers, the need for bundling is slowly disappearing again. And if you're targeting something like electron, there is _really_ no need to bundle because you're distributing the entire filesystem with load times that don't involve network requests.

Efficiency with tree shaking is still very important, which is easier to manage with a bundler.

If companies could, they would just send your browser a binary blob. From a business point of view, exposing your inner workings / modules is a no-go. Same for local apps using Electron, there's a (perceived at least) business need to obfuscate the code into a big ball of mud that is continuously changing with every build so external patches cannot be applied, e.g. Slack doesn't want you to have the ability to read or modify your local Electron client.

They will soon with WASM. I'm pretty sure this is the main reason behind it being pushed.

We have support for outputting native ES modules in Parcel 2, which is currently in alpha! We can even compile your app to multiple targets to support modern/legacy browsers. :)

2020...

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