I’m scrolling and scrolling waiting for a paragraph that tries to sell me on why I’d bother and risk upgrading. I think the best I got were patch notes.
Any good reason to upgrade?
Any good reason to upgrade?
- Improve build performance with Persistent Caching.
- Improve Long Term Caching with better algorithms and defaults.
- Improve bundle size with better Tree Shaking and Code Generation.
- Improve compatibility with the web platform.
- Clean up internal structures that were left in a weird state while implementing features in v4 without introducing any breaking changes.
- Prepare for future features by introducing breaking changes now, allowing us to stay on v5 for as long as possible
The benchmark is dominated by terser and SourceMap performance. What you see are different terser configurations. Webpack 4 with compress.passes: 1 and webpack 5 with compress.passes: 2. Enabled SourceMaps makes minimizing extra expensive.
(removal of the dependency on chokidar and fsevents)
Failure of bundlers (Webpack, Parcel, Rollup, etc) to support import.meta.url has been a major headache for me. Making my JS library usable in sites that use such bundlers in their build chain has led to me making some - questionable, let's say - decisions in the library's code. The sooner I can remove my "solutions", the happier I will be!
- Nullish coalescing
- Optional chaining
- Numeric separators
- Logical assignment operators
I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned in the notes -- I guess everyone is transpiling for production anyway, but it's still nice not having to do so in development.
Now if only they had a way to activate support for stage 3 features (https://github.com/acornjs/acorn-stage3) so all the class field stuff could be added to that list (modern browsers have already supported it to varying degrees for a while now).