Switch to esbuild?

[hoodmane]

I got a basic build working with esbuild via:

1. npm i esbuild
2. Add the following build script as build.mjs

import esbuild from 'esbuild';
const { build } = esbuild;

build({
    entryPoints: ['lib/index.ts'],
    outdir: "dist",
    sourcemap: "linked",
}).catch(() => process.exit(1));

3. run node build.mjs

This is advantageous because esbuild has 30x faster build times:

$ time npm run build > /dev/null

real	0m1.854s
user	0m2.890s
sys	    0m0.111s

$ time node build.mjs 

real	0m0.048s
user	0m0.032s
sys	    0m0.016s

[alexmojaki]

Sure. Never heard of esbuild before, and I wasn't bothered by a few seconds to build, but webpack clearly has issues and doing this in pyodide-worker-runner may be interesting. Just check that dist is the same before and after, and make a PR.

[alexmojaki]

I tried following these steps in pyodide-worker-runner. Issues I noticed:

1. No .d.ts file
2. No minification
3. Need to handle uses of webpack raw-loader and worker-loader.

I'm sure these are all fixable, just pointing them out.

[hoodmane]

Right the word "basic" is doing some work here, unfortunately I mean with some loss of functionality. Hopefully it's possible to get the functionality you need back but I think esbuild is not a fully general replacement for webpack.