Benchmarks

[DylanPiercey]

Hey, this looks like a cool project. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet but I think seeing a few benchmarks against competitors would be cool.

Also what is your main goal in making another bundler? I think the current api looks nice by the way.

[seebigs]

RE: benchmarks

I agree. I would like to eventually create a separate repo called "frontend-build-tool-comparison" or something like that to build the same output bundles using each of the popular tools and benchmark them all in terms of size and performance.

For now, you can already compare the output size of an example bundle with some required dependencies by cloning the bundl-pack repo and running:
$ node test/compare

[seebigs]

RE: the main goal

The main goal of Bundl is to be an on-demand build tool instead of a prescriptive tool.

Despite their differences, most popular build tools (Gulp, Webpack, etc) work using the same primary concept: make a code change, then run a command to generate new bundles, then refresh your view to see your changes. I work at a company where building new bundles takes waaaay too long, and this is where we see this model breakdown.

In my day-to-day, the mix of bundles loaded onto any given webpage is so dynamic that it becomes really difficult to specify just a subset of bundles when I run my build. So, I end up usually just building them all even if the page that I'm working on only needs 3 of them. So much of my dev time is wasted waiting for unneeded assets to build, and that's why I decided that I wanted to create a better approach.

I can use a "watch" task with other tools, but it only knows which src files have changed, not which bundles need to be rebuilt as a result.

I am aware of the "hot reloading" that's offered with some tools, but that really just eliminates the need to refresh your view manually. It still builds all of the bundles.

In contrast, Bundl keeps an internal map between src files and which bundles include each src file. When a bundle is requested from the Bundl webserver, it figures out if any of its src files have changed and rebuilds the bundle on-the-fly if it needs to.

The resulting workflow now looks like: make a code change, then refresh your view to see your changes (and see them rebuild only if necessary). So much better!