[TameAntelope]

I was just looking at Parcel a week or so ago to replace the stagnated Snowpack project for our frontend.

Should I just stop trying to avoid it and just use Webpack 5, or can I actually rely on Parcel in a way I couldn't Snowpack?

I just want to bundle my React app, I'm not trying to do anything special...

[no_way]

Use Vite instead, it has very nice developer experience. Webpack is a "legacy" bundler, while it is supported, is shouldn't really be used in new projects if you really value your sanity.

[krono]

Webpack is under active development though, nothing legacy about it as far as I'm aware. Are you referring to abandoned third-party plugins maybe?

Vite and all the other bundlers are really awesome, but Webpack's strenght - and I think this may also be the root of the issues you seem to be having with the tool - is that there's almost no magic and barely any handholding. Freedom and reliability at the cost of having to build your own configuration (it's just dumping plugin config objects in an array, really not difficult).

[no_way]

I have done manual configs from scratch in Rollup, even wrote bunch of plugins for stuff like custom css class minifying and web worker support, so no I don't need handholding :) Setting it all up was even fun, everything was well documented and clear, with Webpack on the other hand, you only have fun if you like pain.

[ricardobeat]

> there's almost no magic

That depends entirely on your definition of “magic”. Needing a specific incantation of seven different plugins and rules, that are often conflicting and incomprehensible, to get a basic project to build, is the same as magic to me.

I assume you mean magic == conventions or implicit behavior. I’ll take that over the Webpack mess any day.

[krono]

Magic as in runtime hacks and precompiled semi-proprietary rust binaries.

Neither of which are necessarily negatives of course!

Only thing is that for every minute gained from those speedy rust builds, I lost five more on debugging stuff that used to work fine with Babel + having to learn this new language to write replacements for now unsupported plugins :)

[01acheru]

> it's just dumping plugin config objects in an array, really not difficult

Until you eject a CRA :)

[krono]

Which is the cherry on top for those types of self-chastisement fetishists who willingly put themselves at the mercy of CRA ;-)

[bredren]

Check out the CRACO project. Allows config of CRA w o ejecting.

[mitemte]

Vite is so much better, IMO. Quicker too, since it uses esbuild in dev mode.

[pferdone]

I seriously don't get the hatred Webpack receives. Calling it legacy when it introduced stuff like module federation is unfair to say the least. Just because a lot of people use CRA or some "zero config" bundler, or because esbuild etc are picking up momentum, doesn't mean it's bad. The documentation is actually really good IMO.

[spartanatreyu]

The problem with using something like webpack is that you can't use it for something quick.

You can't dip into the documentation for the one thing you're trying to do, you have to spend time reading a large chunk of the documentation, then going to forums and such to try an understand the history of how that one thing you're trying to do has changed over webpack's history.

Then 5 months later when you're doing it for another project, you have to re-read all that documentation again because one other thing is different.

Compare that waste of time and effort to:

A developer is now unavailable and you are taking over the project. The project uses a modern build-system/module-loader/etc... You need to change one thing to the way to project is built.

You don't have to learn an uber nested spaghetti config file that looks like a domain-specific language. You just read the miminal configuration the previous developer left you and now you know what to change, or how to add the one thing you need to do. You've now saved days of work.

[alluro2]

I agree that hatred is probably somewhat unwarranted, and flexibility and support Webpack has is immense - but, based on my experience, I understand some of the people and where it's coming from.

I just replaced Webpack with Vite, in a 2yo React project, with relatively standard webpack config (scss, fonts, assets copying, minify etc). I was able to remove 24 total devDependencies packages, including the whole of babel and its related ones, bunch of webpack plugins that broke our build on every packages upgrade (e.g. to Webpack 4, then again for Webpack 5) etc etc.

We now have nothing to do with babel, hard-to-understand plugins that someone added since it was solving a build error, nothing to do with webpack, just 1 almost non-existent config file, instant HMR, and 3x faster build...

[rhengles]

One thing that always put me off about webpack is the default way it compiles your code. One of the ways is(was?) compiling code as _eval_(!!) statements and code as string. It is absolutely impossible to debug such code.

You were meant to rely on sourcemaps to get something on your debugger, but despite using the latest Chrome and developer tools at the time, I could never get it to work to actually debug sites.

I know Rollup, Vite and etc had a much easier time providing an easier developer experience because they rely on the browser's native ESM support, but I never could understand why webpack decided to mangle the code so badly.

[tiborsaas]

> Webpack is a "legacy" bundler

How did you end up with this assessment? I'm not a fan either, but it's still very popular, I doubt it will go away in the next 5 years.

[no_way]

It won't go away, it will still be supported and used for many years, but majority of new projects today won't use it. Brief history: Rollup dramatically improved bundler plugin and ES modules situation, then came new super fast bundlers like Esbuild and finally solutions combining both like Vite. Webpack is still playing catch up with that. There is literally zero reasons to choose clunky, slow Webpack configs, while alternatives exist, unless you have a legacy codebase and migrating is not an option.

[howdydoo]

> literally zero reasons

What about module federation? Has any other bundler implemented that?

[dmitriid]

It's a relatively minor feature used by relatively few people.

[tiborsaas]

Do you know any success stories with that?

[howdydoo]

I haven't heard any, but I haven't gone looking either. I'm just saying there's at least literally one reason to use webpack for new code.

[nicoburns]

I'd argue that Vite's still pretty immature. It's great if you can stick within what works with it, but webpack is still the gold standard in terms of compatibility and features, and I suspect that will be the case for another couple of years while the native code bundlers (esbuild, swc, etc) catch up with their JS counterparts.

[TheFragenTaken]

> Webpack is a "legacy" bundler

What a weird thing to say. I feel like people say this because they don't understand it's uses, and it's versatility.

[CognitiveLens]

Parcel has been around for awhile, and the project currently has a lot of activity - I've made the call to migrate an old create-react-app project to Parcel 2 and in general it is going well.

The nice thing about Parcel is that it is intentionally low-config with relatively intuitive defaults, which tells me that it wouldn't be terribly difficult to move to a different bundler in the future. Webpack has gotten better, but you can quickly end up with a _lot_ of Webpack-specific config that makes future migrations hard.

That said, optimizing for future migrations shouldn't generally be your #1 priority - I also like Parcel's speed, and new things like ParcelCSS just validate that further.

[nawgz]

Snowpack, ESBuild, ..., all promised us nice frontend compiles, yet I still turn to Webpack every time I actually want everything to work - you always hit roadblocks you can't solve in these other tools.

That'd be my recommendation to you, still, sadly.

[omnimus]

Not my experience. Both esbuild and vite have been great for my usecases.

[armchairhacker]

I recommend Vite. I use ESBuild in some libraries but it has a learning curve. Vite's experience is similar to Webpack.

[01acheru]

Parcel is becoming my go-to choice most of the time now. I’ve migrated some apps out of CRA, pure Webpack and Snowpack to it and I need to say it was incredible.

Some minor issues with HMR on one of those projects I still can’t figure out. Anyway having something that works, with JSX, with TS, really fast, in just 2/3 really simple steps is amazing! You don’t even need to turn your brain on.

My two cents.

[CognitiveLens]

Just a stab in the dark, but I was having HMR issues as well and it turned out to be an obscure transitive dependency conflict - details and solutions here on the outside chance it's the same thing affecting your project https://github.com/parcel-bundler/parcel/issues/6685

[01acheru]

I'm also on that issue with you :)

Sadly in my use case it is not a dependency conflict, but I'm failing to replicate it (and actually not even trying very hard). I guess it will automagically fix itself on some minor update.

[samhuk]

I have been using esbuild for a while, and I can say that it's looking like a huge improvement over webpack, snowpack, vite, etc.

I made a web app starter that uses esbuild to bundle a react-redux app [0] and my experience was very positive of the bundler.

[0] https://github.com/samhuk/tree-starter

[ianschmitz]

Vite and snowpack are built on top of esbuild, so I’m not sure your comment makes sense.

[samhuk]

The point being that, IMHO, extensions over ESBuild tend to not improve the developer experience because they have a tendency to bloat and steer towards being "webpack but esbuild", which defeats the point of esbuild, being the "anti-webpack".

[mitemte]

Tools such as Vite, aren’t designed to improve the developer experience of ESBuild. They exist separately and leverage ESBuild’s strong qualities – JS, TS and CSS bundling and minification.

[ReleaseCandidat]

I used Parcel for about a week a month ago. Couldn't get the HTTPS server to use my certificate and key and would have needed to write a plugin so that it wouldn't rename favicons and delete files not mentioned in the HTML file.

So, Esbuild for 'no configuration' as it is significantly faster than Parcel and Webpack for more complex stuff.