It wasn't clear until now that the configuration is done through JSON rather than being configurable through code (i.e TypeScript).
Urgh, JSON for configuration. That's going to be horrible.
Urgh, JSON for configuration. That's going to be horrible.
Quite a few tools went from just JSON configuration files to supporting both .js and .json.
Regarding caching, perhaps I'm mistaken but what's the issue there? Two JSON documents can be equivalent with different bytes so you need to re-parse the configuration file fairly often anyway. So what's the difference with just re-evaluating a .js configuration file and caching the output? If someone wants to put a `if (random() > 0.1)` statement in their config then that's their problem.
You cannot statically cache the results of a .js file - it might include objects or functions that cannot be serialized, and might cause side effects that parcel cannot know about. If we supported .js config files, we would have to intentionally limit what you can return to basically just JSON, so you wouldn’t get much benefit from it and it would be hard to enforce.
Looking forward to reading about the new release!
That need won't ever go away, so not supporting means we're back to users generating their own "static" config files in a separate process. Nothing has been saved, only made more complicated.