Discussion on: I am the author of Elm in Action. Ask Me Anything!

To expand on the Webpack issues:

• Webpack is very memory intensive
• If there are multiple entry points (i.e lots of bundles) then Elm is not very good at parallelizing shared asset control.
• Elm-make is slow, and if the dependency tree triggers an expensive change, then it's important to realise that Elm causes a slow re-compile - but webpack is responsible for filling up memory, and therefore slowing everything down
• Webpack can segfault (and does if you aren't careful)

I worked on this a bit to help fix it:

• github.com/elm-community/elm-webpa... limits the number of parallel builds, preventing collisions
• github.com/elm-community/elm-webpa... switches the way that node-elm-compiler was looking for dependencies, and helped fix a pretty bad problem of opening too many things.
• github.com/elm-community/elm-webpa... makes files be watched in a more sensible manner