[dluan]

What happens when we reach the tip of bundling? Once you're in ms territory (like esbuild is), then what are the really creative things you can do if say every browser had a little WASM mako or some bundler in it?

It's very cool though and seems like a lot of effort went into this.

[tinco]

It's in the ms for a small projects. These improvements are not to shave a couple ms off some small codebase, but would shave seconds off of really large projects. The codebase I'm working on right now isn't really large, about 5 years of development with on average 2-3 developers working on it and in vite (esbuild) the build time is 20.78 seconds on my M1 MBP. This project claims to be twice as fast as vite, so it would shave off 10 seconds, that's a significant gain. It would probably have a nice impact on our CI/CD pipeline, if the benchmark is representative of real world codebases.

[dluan]

I ripped out webpacker and replaced it with esbuild in a big legacy rails app for the front end, probably 2-3 years ago, and its been fantastic and I haven't looked back. It's more or less made front end bundling an afterthought. Going from 3s to 1.5s on my M2 (esbuild to mako) isn't a gamechanger, so for me it feels like it's already getting close to the peak, whatever that might mean.

But I was more just asking what's the theoretical limit for this kind of optimization, and at the very least with rust. O(n)?

[tinco]

A that would be hard to say. A lower limit would be reading your entire project and the dependencies that are used once, and writing the bundled/minified code once. Possibly some parts of that could be done at the same time as you determine the bounds of the dependencies as you read in the code. So O(n) where n is in operations over lines of code in your project at least.

There's probably trade-offs too. Like do you bother with tree shaking to make your end product smaller, or do you not to make your build performance closer to that optimal read-once write-once lower bound.

[aaaaaaabbbbbb]

Note that while Vite transpiles with esbuild, it bundles with Rollup, which is single-threaded JS.

Vite also uses esbuild to prebundle dependencies for the dev server, but this is separate from production builds.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

20 to 10 seconds for a production build sounds very insignificant. How often are you building for prod?

For dev, you definitely want subsecond recompiles but prod can take a few minutes.