[girvo]

> No one (at least, no one I know) is installing node modules like isArray to use in the browser.

Erm, well, considering the adoption rate of Browserify and Webpack, I'm going to disagree with you there. Especially considering React's momentum practically requiring some form of module builder.

[esailija]

Startup speed is terrible with that approach, each browserified module adds like 10x more code as boilerplate than something like isArray implementation would take. Then every module dependency is resolved dynamically at runtime, which will also quickly become a performance problem even when you aren't using micromodules.

[Klathmon]

I haven't touched browserify, but with webpack what you said could not be more false...

Webpack doesn't bundle at runtime, it doesn't add any amount of code overhead per module that I can easily measure, and it doesn't trash startup speed.

[nilliams]

Same goes for browserify. You can have lots of tiny modules and (watchify especially) is fast to re-build. And yeah perf of 'require' statements at run-time is a non-issue.

[15155]

> it doesn't add any amount of code overhead per module

It's something like tens of bytes (minified), FWIW, for the closure that each module gets put into.