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Comment by throwAGIway | Hacker News Reader

SWC doesn't bundle at all. Esbuild is a pretty good bundler but works well only if your code and dependencies use ESM, it's not as good as other options with CommonJS.

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That’s not the biggest problem of esbuild. Esbuild has poor support for code splitting (it’s the first priority on their roadmap[1]) and limited plugin interface which makes it a poor choice for complex projects. These are the reasons that Vite for instance can’t use esbuild for production builds.

While I haven’t tried Mako, it seems to have support for advanced code splitting[2]. No idea how powerful its plugin system is.

[1] https://esbuild.github.io/faq/#upcoming-roadmap

[2] https://makojs.dev/docs/features#code-splitting

Also, the vite team in collab with a few others is building https://rolldown.rs/, to replace esbuild and rollup in vite. It's goal is to be faster than esbuild, with extended chunking options and so on.

> Esbuild [...] works well only if your code and dependencies use ESM

I cannot attest to that. We are using Esbuild plus CJS at $DAYJOB no problem. Why would that be an issue?

It's an issue because CommonJS allows stuff that's forbidden in static ESM imports/exports, and it was normal to use. Newer code is usually fine, but there are many older backend libraries that can cause issues with Esbuild. Webpack had to learn how to deal with it because it existed at the time CommonJS was most popular, Esbuild didn't.

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