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Comment by jampekka | Hacker News Reader

Intrestingly esbuild isn't included in their benchmarks.

Esbuild is the only current build-tool that keeps one sane. The serve-mode is excellent and elegant with no brittle constantly breaking hacks like HMR or file watching.

Sadly configuring especially the serve-mode is a bit badly documented, and not usable via CLI flags if one needs plugins.

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> Intrestingly esbuild isn't included in their benchmarks.

i noticed, and was very surprised by that. surely esbuild is the "standard" fast bundler these days; everyone knows webpack is slow so doing better, even significantly better, than it isn't a very large claim.

To each their own. I can't imagine doing UI development without HMR anymore. Makes it so much faster to iterate.

That's what Vite is for: all the zip of esbuild plus HMR that works. Usually works anyway... looking at one project where I never have to reload, and another that I'm doing that every ten saves or so. Much sloppier legacy sources in the second tho, Vite really pays off when you write more modern code from the start.

I rather hit Ctrl-R on each iteration than worry about whether I've hit the 1/10 buggy state on every change. With esbuild the reload is practically instant.

It was pretty infuriating wondering why my changes weren't taking effect, but like I said, it only hit me for that one project, and now I'm ready for it (I had to manually refresh every time beforehand anyway). It's a legacy codebase, I'm already used to intermittent nonsense like that. HMR never fails on the other project -- but now I've jinxed it for sure!

I don't find hitting Ctrl-R or F5 to be much of a hinderance for iteration. Especially when you don't have to worry whether the system has been left to some incorrect state by HMR.

You mustn't be working on forms then. Or anything state heavy.

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