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Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

> “Web development shouldn’t need a build step”

Everything running in a browser is interpreted. There is no reason for webdev to require a build step, and it largely does so because JS standards haven't delivered anything around static typing. Even a "this syntax is valid but ignored" would enable IDEs to provide checks via LSPs, but for no-build running.

Build steps and development iteration overhead is something to be avoided at all costs. For it to have been introduced, with multi-second latency, to web dev. is a sign of developer experience dropping off a cliff.

Time-to-iterate, tool quality, release speed, etc. are essential to being able to build mental models of code (etc.)

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>Everything running in a browser is interpreted.

That's exactly the reason for a build step.

In a build step the code can be optimized to reduce and/or accelerate the code that needs to be interpreted.

JS builds today do not appreciably accelerate code, and minimization is of marginal benefit when served assets are appropriately compressed using technologies browsers already support.

No matter how fancy your compression, that code with comments stripped will compress to less bytes than the same code with comments.

No matter how much would you try to save those 10 KB, someone will put 30 MB image file just to display tiny flag in the top right corner. Stripping comments is unnecessary optimization.

Ease of deploying is a huge thing which gets lost. Over focusing on a single area of an application makes things really obvious the big picture was lost somewhere.

I appreciate the build step in setups like Vite/Vue because the development server can automatically and accurately hotpatch the application when I make changes. I don’t think you’d want to change the standards to couple DOM and js in the way that makes this possible in Vue but it’s an iteration speed improvement nonetheless.

I wouldn’t want to have either 100 lodash dependencies or ship a ton of functions that aren’t used. Tree shaking is a pretty nice build step.

A build step is fine. I think the point misses the real issue: that build step changing every 6 months in the web world.

Every time you have to go back to an "old" project you haven't worked on in six months there is a webpack/npm dependency hell greeting you.

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