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Comment by danabramov | Hacker News Reader

What will SystemJS+JSPM give me over Webpack? Just curious.

Webpack also supports ES6 modules (as well as CJS and AMD) when used with 6to5 transpiler, and has a lot of great features like splitting code into bundles, figuring out the best way to split dependencies based on module size, and asynchronously loading missing chunks.

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Haizz, I've just learned to use Webpack. Now comes SystemJS+JSPM. There are just too many new tools, workflows and different ways of doing things in Javascript world.

No, because SystemJS+JSPM does nothing to invalidate your Webpack knowledge. It's still an active project that works just fine for the needs of many developers.

This is a trite response. If it does something significantly better than it does do something to invalidate knowledge in a defacto sense, at least for the caring craftsman.

Not that there's any point complaining about it either though...

You don't have to try to learn everything. I know HR throws the kitchen sink into job listings, but it's okay to specialize in only one copy of a particular tool.

It's just not that hard. Try it and see if you like it.

In their current states, Webpack is for the production applications, JSPM for development / little ES6 apps, and SystemJS is used for Node.js.

- Webpack supports much more than just ES6 (and more people work on it), so you probably want to use it for production apps.

- JSPM allows you to load ES6 library by transpiling them on-the-fly, which is great for simplicity.

- SystemJS works by itself in a Node environment, you don't need JSPM for it.

Guy Bedford has made a great tool with JSPM.

This seems so fragmented, even before you consider all the other module loaders, transpilers and toolchains.

I'm a senior frontend developer and I find this side of JavaScript truly bewildering.

Agreed on there being too many tools. Thankfully most of them are starting to embrace the same core feature: writing npm modules. Small bits of code that you publish once to npm, and then reuse across many projects and potentially many build/workflow systems.

The main issue is really the lack of module concept in Javascript core. I hope things get better with ES6, because at this point it will be much, much easier to write a library to load them all, without relying on "proprietary" loaders.

It runs in the browser so less boilerplate to start a project, don't have to run a build daemon for every project or wait for rebuilds to finish, etc.

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