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Discussion on: What is Parcel JS ? 📦

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marzelin profile image
Marc Ziel • Edited

Browserify??? Is anyone using browserify these days? I haven't heard of browserify in years.

You didn't answer why do we need a bundler. Why having a bundler become a standard practice?

Webpack offers zero config experience just as parcel does but it become a low-level tool used by framework clis like cra or vue-cli.

When you compare parcel nowadays, you should compare it with vite or snowpack.
Even though they're still called bundlers, bundling - that is combining various resources together for production, become only a part of what they are expected to do. You still want fast production builds, but bundling for production is much rare than providing instant feedback in development. We expect fast development cycle - immediate results produced by the development server after introducing a change in source code.

There are different requirements expected of a bundler:

  • bundling for production:
    • asset optimization
    • fast asset generation
  • transpilation:
    • does it work with different kinds of assets (scss, ts, pug, hs, etc)
    • ease of configuration
  • development:
    • fast and efficient recompilation
    • ability to maintain good performance when codebase grows
    • debugging experience