[ForSpareParts]

Webpack really messed up IMO -- v5 took a really, really long time to drop because they were making huge changes ostensibly for performance... and then when it came out it actually made performance worse for many projects. I think they've fixed that now, but the damage is done.

I think building js in js is just not fast enough anymore, everyone is moving towards compiled languages for building their apps. The next winner in the space will be something like vite that uses a compiled language under the hood (vite uses esbuild, which is written in Go).

[dmix]

For me using Webpacker with rails was a nightmare in the last two years.

The move to 3->4 was painful as 25% of my projects started to move to 4 and no longer worked with 3. So I was stuck with some legacy packages during a time I was upgrading from Vue 2 -> 3. AFAIK they Rails didn't even get to Webpack 5 in practice by the time I left.

Vite came to the rescue at a perfect time.

[WorldMaker]

I don't think just building JS is slow, I think the issue is that most of the ecosystem is ready to move on to more "no build" scenarios now that ES modules are supported everywhere that matters [0] [1] (Node 12+). Webpack still doesn't seem to have much of an ESM "native" approach/roadmap. Snowpack had a relatively good ESM "native" approach, but appears finished and points to Vite now. Vite isn't entirely ESM "native" yet, but there's more work there mentioned in these release notes and it definitely appears to be in their roadmap/planning horizon. I'm curiously following Vite, but so far it smells to me more of a webpack too much of the kitchen sink "fork" than not still for the "no build"/"targeted build" world.

I've been experimenting with some stuff using esbuild directly in a "targeted" way that builds only a few things with most stuff just Typescript transpilation only (again). I've almost got a feeling the next winner may just be Typescript+esbuild, but not at all because esbuild is fast or written in Go. It may still be Typescript+rollup, given the hints of what's coming in the next Rollup major. (Typescript is still in JS and getting faster every release, with incremental build support for large projects getting better all the time. Rollup is still in JS and still a decent esbuild competitor.) In a "no build"/"targeted build" world it's not really speed that matters but a minimal, targeted API that's easy to automate as you choose targets to build and it may be the case that the time of the "kitchen sink plus a million plugins" builder is over.

[0] https://caniuse.com/es6-module

[1] https://caniuse.com/es6-module-dynamic-import