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Question: We are planning to transition our old ES5 codebase to modern ES6/ES7 and even typescript.

What would be the build tool you would recommend if we want to start supporting ES6/ES7 and even Typescript?

Webpack, Vite some other?

This is a vanilla Javascript Project with large codebase it's been built using custom build tools like UglifyJS and UglifyCSS and of after lots of begging it finally got the green light to move to a more modern build tool and start supporting a more standard JavaScript Features.

Mainly I want to move to TypeScript but transition would be slow so the build tool would need to support .ts and .js as well, that is traspile both the .ts and .js into one final production build.

What build tool would you recommend for that?

Comments
  • 2
    If it wasn't for the web I would have said Deno ..
  • 3
    @ElectroArchiver Weird way to write 'dunno'
  • 1
    @alexbrooklyn Yep, couldn't help myself thinking about all the juicy old JS code that will be refactored ..
  • 1
    I recommend WebPack. You will probably spend a lot of time configuring it initially (maybe a few days).

    Webpack is flexible, unlike some other build systems that are mostly meant for one specific framework but useless if you use a different framework
  • 0
    Webpack is the hardest to configure and slow
    Choose literally anything else
    Regarding vite: it's not framework-specific and has some quirks, but should be fine otherwise
  • 0
    @hinst honestly I have experience working with webpack so choosing webpack seems easier choice for me, but compared to vite webpack suffers from a performance issues, on the other hand those issues can be solved by switching to esbuild which is what vite uses, but again everywhere that i've read webpack seems to be a bit buggy..
  • 1
    @ElectroArchiver I hope to minimize the refactoring to the minimum at the beginning because of course the manager can't allow bigger refactors.

    So I hope I could get the bundler up and running with minimal changes and do the refactor as I work on features/bugs etc.
  • 0
    Personally not good at script-builders but got some great co-workers.

    We've dabbled in most transpilers and bundlers from Babel to Webpack to Rollup.

    Webpack is considered quite heavy.

    They recently showed a branch using EsBuild which is super fast and also didn't look hard to config.

    Snowpack is another builder I've heard great things about, which also prides itself on being less heavy than Webpack.

    We're not using TS though. (Allthough I would totally be on board to introduce it slowly so I'm interested to see where this thread goes)
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