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Comment by parhamn | Hacker News Reader

The next-gen bundler rewrites are getting insane, just as things were consolidating in the other parts of JS. We now have:

- EsBuild

- SWC (also written by someone who works at Vercel)

- TurboPack

- Vite (rollup)

- Parcel

- Rome

I've noticed in the javascript ecosystem there is much less convergence than in other languages. Everyone wants a flag in the ground.

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Beauty of nextjs though is that you don't have to worry about it unless you want to go under the hood. My quality of life has improved tremendously since I stopped having to deal with webpack config files, and upgrading to the hottest bundler on the street couldn't be lower on my list of priorities.

Yeah exactly, Next.js is the consolidation. If they can make things faster behind the scenes without my having to make changes, that's great.

This will consolidate again, and these tools are not all equal. They cover different parts of the whole thing. There is clearly a desire for faster compilation and bundling, and various groups and people are trying out different approaches now.

Right now you can stay with Webpack or whatever you were using already, or you can try one of the new shiny things if you want to. But if you want to avoid the churn, it's probably time to just wait for a bit until things settle down.

It's a bigger ecosystem than all others, and there's no batteries included in web development, so it necessitates the need for tooling to be built from scratch.

That's a good thing? Keeps things fresh and keeps established "norms" unable to stay complacent.

Actually it tells me that the javascript ecosystem fails to build software that can adapt to change. The culture is to throw everything out and start fresh every time they want to do something different. It's terrible engineering.

Thankfully that's just your opinion. I appreciate all the innovation and experimentation that's happening. Nobody is dictating you or anyone else use these tools.

It's not an opinion. It's common sense. Do you think Rust or Swift would exist if LLVM would have stopped its development long ago in favour of <insert new exiting tool>?

Not only in software, if we keep renewing rather than perfecting software, we won't go anywhere.

My opinion based on decades of experience in web development. I've been through this churn dozens of times, it is tiring. The other ecosystems I work with do not work this way and yet they still innovate a lot.

Vite is built on esbuild and Rollup, but there’s nothing tying it to either. In theory with the evolving ecosystem, it can swap whatever it wants to use internally and still provide a consistent experience.

everyone believes they can write some JS and call themselves developer

bigger audience, bigger chance to make it big selling crap to developers so more personalities try to build an audience by making OSS

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