[ilaksh]

Anyone else prefer to use web components without bundling?

I probably should not admit this, but I have been using Lit Elements with raw JavaScript code. Because I stopped using autocomplete awhile ago.

I guess not using TypeScript at this point is basically the equivalent for many people these days of saying that I use punch cards.

[VPenkov]

37 Signals [0] famously uses their own Stimulus [1] framework on most of their products. Their CEO is a proponent of the whole no-build approach because of the additional complexity it adds, and because it makes it difficult for people to pop your code and learn from it.

[0]: https://basecamp.com/ [1]: https://stimulus.hotwired.dev/

[evilduck]

It's impossible to look at a Stimulus based site (or any similar SSR/hypermedia app) and learn anything useful beyond superficial web design from them because all of the meaningful work is being done on the other side of the network calls. Seeing a "data-action" or a "hx-swap" in the author's original text doesn't really help anyone learn anything without server code in hand. That basically means the point is moot because if it's an internal team member or open source wanting to learn from it, the original source vs. minified source would also be available.

It's also more complex to do JS builds in Ruby when Ruby isn't up to the task of doing builds performantly and the only good option is calling out to other binaries. That can also be viewed from the outside as "we painted ourselves into a corner, and now we will discuss the virtues of standing in corners". Compared to Bun, this feels like a dated perspective.

DHH has had a lot of opinions, he's not wrong on many things but he's also not universally right for all scenarios either and the world moved past him back in like 2010.

[VPenkov]

Well you do learn that a no-build process can work at some scale, and you can see what tech stack is used and roughly how it works.

But regardless, I didn't mean to make any argument for or against this, I'm saying this was one of the points DHH made at some point.

[christophilus]

Dunno. You can build without minifying if you want it to be (mostly) readable. I wouldn’t want to give up static typing again in my career.

[dinkleberg]

Even with TS, if I’m doing web components rather than a full framework I prefer not bundling. That way I can have each page load the exact components it needs. And with http/2 I’m happy to have each file separate. Just hash them and set an immutable cache header so it even when I make changes the users only have to pull the new version of things that actually changed.

[zeroq]

This.

I'm old enough to have a first hand experience of building a Flash website that required to load couple hundred tiny xml files for configuration only to find out that some ~300kb was taking couple of minutes to load because of limited connection pool in old http.

Back then bundling and overly complicated build steps were not yet invented, so instead of serving one large XML (which would work out of the box, as there was a root xml and certain nodes instead of having data were linking to external files) I quickly decided to implement zip compression and bundle the package that way.

Fast forward to 2025 when most devs need an external library to check if number isEven and the simplest project need a toolchain that's more complicated that the whole Apollo project.

[zeroq]

> not using TypeScript at this point is basically the equivalent for many people these days of saying that I use punch cards

I very much enjoy writing no-build, plain vanilla JS for the sake of simplicity and ability to simply launch a project by dragging HTML file onto a browser. Not to mention the power of making changes with notepad instead of needing whole toolchain on your system.

[brazukadev]

> Anyone else prefer to use web components without bundling?

Yes! not only that but without ShadowDOM as well.

[WorldMaker]

I've been leaning that direction more and more every year. ESM loading in browsers is really good at this point (with and without HTTP/2+). Bundle-free living is nice now.

Even frameworks with more dependencies bundling/vendoring just your dependencies at package upgrade time and using an importmap to load them is a good experience.

I'm not giving up Typescript at this point, but Typescript configured to modern `"target"` options where it is doing mostly just type stripping is a good experience, especially in a simple `--watch` loop.

[mb2100]

Definitely team #noBundler for most websites. But I didn't wanna give up TypeScript. With Deno and even Node.js supporting type-stripping now natively, all I had to do for https://mastrojs.github.io was to use ts-blank-space to transform client-components on the fly.

[mock-possum]

God yes, as little tool chain as I can get away with.

[LelouBil]

Stopped using autocomplete ? I want to hear more about this.

I could never.

[nonethewiser]

Can't say I generally agree with dropping TS for JS but I suppose it's easier to argue when you are working on smaller projects. But here is someone that agrees with you with less qualification than that https://world.hey.com/dhh/turbo-8-is-dropping-typescript-701...

I was introduced to this decision from the Lex Fridman/DHH podcast. He talked a lot about typescript making meta programming very hard. I can see how that would be the case but I don't really understand what sort of meta programming you can do with JS. The general dynamic-ness of it I get.

[mariusor]

Luckily Lit supports typescript so you wouldn't need to drop it.