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Comment by no_wizard | Hacker News Reader

I know that this is all about Vite but if you like Vite, I want to give a shout-out to Parcel[0] as well. Its a very similar philosophy, built on top of SWC[1] and has its own set of great optimizations. I've regularly gotten smaller overall bundle sizes with parcel than with Vite (though that gap is very narrow now) in my experience. I wish Parcel got more mention, especially in the React community (where it shines the most). It really is very very fast and I think has really cool integrations (like file system resolution) out of the box.

[0]: https://parceljs.org/docs/

[1]: https://swc.rs/

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Parcel has been praised on here many times when it originally came out. I was an avid user but the nail in the coffin was the horrid and long release of v2 which took forever, the docs were in disarray, and overall just left a bad taste in my mouth. I also think there was some common issue where v1 didn’t support some version of postcss for quite some time and I and many others jumped ship to vite.

I have been using Parcel for years now, the biggest issue: many weird bugs and things break which each update.

Common things that break: specific operators (?.), caching issues, missing modules in the output bundle, build errors, etc.

Agree with this strongly. Also, it's great to have a zero-config tool like Parcel, but it needs to have a path from zero-config to "some config" as your project grows. I found this very difficult and jumped to Vite.

This has bitten me so many times. Parcel works flawlessly until it suddenly doesn't and then it's very difficult to do custom things. As someone who reaches for Webpack on most projects, this lack of customizability when you needed it was painful.

Parcel 2 solved this though. You can override pretty much everything if you want now.

One other thing is that is was "zero config". While everyone likes the idea of "zero config", in reality there are some things you will want to configure. It drove me up a wall with Parcel where I wanted to do X but couldn't and had to do Y instead because there was no way to configure parcel to make X work, not that X wouldn't work with Parcel, there's just no way to configure anything and you're at the mercy of "good defaults"

Ironically, Parcel is the only build tool that ever forced me to change my IDE configuration to [get file watchers to work](https://parceljs.org/features/development/#known-issues-with...). If other non-zero-config tools don't require this to be changed, I'd expect a tool focused on zero-config to support this.

Vite on the other hand hasn't had any such suprises so far.

In Parcel 2, you can configure everything.

I really liked Parcel v1, but v2 completely broke watch for me, which is kind of a dealbreaker these days. I'm currently pretty happy with webpack v5, but definitely have vite on my list to check out.

I really like the defaults Parcel comes with, it is very quick to get started with Parcel.

However, the promise of zero config is made possible in part by "magic" (strange conventions), and by having configuration spread across multiple files (package.json, . parcelrc, custom plugins which for some grave reason you can't use until you publish them to npm)

I really wish Parcel had sane configuration — I want to like it so much, but alas, it falls pray to the pendulum effect.

Not to be unnecessarily dismissive, but installing Parcel makes me a 201MB node_modules folder. That's more dependencies/code than I'm comfortable relying upon.

It should be noted that Vite uses Rollup to bundle assets.

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