[developit]

Hmm - it's not actually specific to Preact, it's just built by the Preact team and we use Preact in the docs. We are missing a bunch of documentation that would have made this clearer though, which I apologize for. While there are some optimizations for Preact in WMR, it can be used for vanilla JavaScript / Lit / Vue / Svelte / etc just fine.

[BadInformatics]

Can you talk more about how WMR fits into the morass of Snowpack, Vite, Rome, Parcel etc.? The self-contained aspect looks great, but I'm at a loss as to how this doesn't also add more entropy into the pool of "next-gen" JS build tools (and thus more analysis paralysis for webdevs)...

[developit]

The tooling space isn't broad enough to allow for differentiation across the board, so we have a number of tools that are working to validate/popularize a subset of functionality on top of the basics.

WMR's unique take is basically to be instant in every possible way, and to provide an ideal substrate for us to build and show Preact features that rely on bundler semantics. We have maintained a Webpack-based build tool for Preact for a while, and wanted to explore what a total re-think would look like. We also spent a while building out new pieces of the bundler that fit this model better than repurposing existing generalized tooling. This is one of the reasons WMR builds as fast as it does despite doing so much optimization work - it's designed around a singular goal and we allowed for very limited compromise.

I think that after a few years we will see a corresponding consolidation of the tools you mentioned, as the dust settles on this newer dev/prod split paradigm and it's effect on the bundler plugin ecosystem.

[brundolf]

I assume features like prerendering HTML must only work for Preact though, right? That requires some significant assumptions about the codebase (compared to tools like Babel and Webpack). Also, hot reloading seems to only work for Preact components (based on the wording)

[developit]

We've only shipped a helper library for Preact, but the Prerendering is actually generic. Some folks are working on helpers for other frameworks. The "API" is just a function exported from your first script tag:

export async function prerender(data) { return { html: "<h1>hi</h1>", links: ["/other-page"] } }

Hot reloading is a similar story, it's the same API as Vite and Snowpack:

if (import.meta.hot) import.meta.hot.accept(({ module }) => { do stuff }));