Everything old is new again! Parcel embarks on the path that Webpack did, and it's only a matter of time before the plugins are doing more and more core work, and Parcel's successor will again rewrite them and bring those in to the core.
> The eternal cycle of developer tool bullshit:
> 1. "Ugh, OldTool™ v3.0.0 is overcomplicated, bloated, slow and unnecessarily configurable!"
> 2. "Introducing SuperTool™ v1.0.0, which just does the stuff you really need. No bloated configuration. No huge ecosystem of extensions. Simple, straightforward and fast."
> 3. "SuperTool™ v1.0.0 is great! But our setup really needs it to do something a bit different, so we've hacked in this extension."
> ...repeat for a while...
> 10. "Introducing SuperTool™ v2.0.0, which now has a more flexible API and configuration , allowing many former hacks to be done in a straightforward way."
> …
I still don't think that Parcel is right for me given how comfortable I am with Webpack, but I welcome a "simpler config" option. Provide language support, but don't assume I want to use Babel, or PostCSS, or any other build tool.
I'm an optimist, though admittedly entirely ignorant of this project. I think some capacity is sometimes lost when new projects are started with new technologies that don't live up to their predecessors, but that accusations of tool choice being fashion-driven are mostly misplaced. There are real, tangible, frequent improvements, and disruption is probably the price of innovation. And it's a price you can mostly avoid paying if you want to keep using what you're using.
My understanding is that webpack can do all of this, you just need a few weeks and a PhD in webpack.
Uff, really hits the nail on the head from my experience with setting projects in the early webpack days.
And Webpack embarked on the path that it’s forefathers did.. gulp, babel, browserify, grunt, and others. But that didn’t stop Webpack from improving on what was there.
The core thing Parcel does (or at least did when Parcel was started) that is/was a fundamental improvement over Webpack is parse your index.html (or whatever you name it, of course) to figure out what to do. I always thought Webpack was silly for asking a human to re-describe it’s html dependencies. I haven’t used Webpack in the last year, so I’m unaware if Webpack has fixed this shortcoming.