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Comment by amadeuspagel | Hacker News Reader

> And then people go "but you can use ESM in browsers without a build step!", apparently not realizing that that is an utterly useless feature because loading a full dependency tree over the network would be unreasonably and unavoidably slow - you'd need as many roundtrips as there are levels of depth in your dependency tree - and so you need some kind of build step anyway, eliminating this entire supposed benefit.

That's not true with skypack, right?

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It's important not to ignore the possibility that perhaps front-end dependencies are out-of-hand, and need to be reduced. ESM cannot fix a decade of bad practices enabled by front-end build bundlers. ESM isn't there to be a viable alternative to webpack. It's there to enable a different vision of application deployment where apps are smaller, and javascript gets css's transitive import() sub-resource distribution, avoiding the headache of a linear list of global scripts.

I really like ESM because I like where it's trying to steer the community of browser application builders. I think front-end builds are terrible on many levels, not the least of which is the obfuscation of code that undermines one of the best features of the web's software distribution, which is its openness. And another major benefit of webapps is that none of the front-end languages require a build step! This makes iteration very fast; if you can make do without the the safety net of a compiler, you can enjoy the speed of not using the bundler.

I think the basic problem with that comparison is that people use bundlers with CSS all the the time for exactly the same basic-physics-of-round-trips reasons. It's common for `import()` in CSS to end up exactly what it usually in frontend JS, a dev organization tool rather than something actually exposed to the browser.

It's a fundamental technical constraint of any tool-less setup. At some point you need to traverse the dependency tree by parsing modules and following imports, and your choice is to do that either:

1) on the client, across the network, one roundtrip for every level of depth, or 2) in a build environment, directly on the filesystem

Option 2 means you need some kind of build tool to make it work, and by that point it doesn't really matter anymore whether the tool just traverses the dependencies and makes a list of filenames, or also concatenates their contents into a bundle.

And that is why the fundamental premise of ESM cannot work; there are no technical options besides those two. If you want to avoid network roundtrips, you must have build tooling. No way around it.

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