Webpack Blog

Correct me if I'm misunderstanding the beta process in the javascript ecosystem, but Webpack v4 went into beta on Jan 25 [1] and removed the beta label on Feb 25 [2]. That's not "a while". While I don't want to detract from the work of maintainers—webpack is a great tool that's central to the workflow of thousands—the lack of documentation coupled with an extremely brief beta period gives most of us the impression of a haphazard, half-baked release that we just aren't going to trust for at least several more point releases. [1] https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-4-beta-try-it-today-6b1d27d7d7e2 [2] https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-4-released-today-6cdb994702d4

No, HTTP2 doesn't just replace bundling, and definitely not what Webpack does. Based on what I've read, sending a few bundled chunks instead of many individual module files will still generally have less overhead. In addition, Webpack's ability to load and transform other file formats like images and styles is something that simply requesting ES modules over HTTP2 can't deal with. Webpack's ability to code-split an application is also important. Tobias Koppers, the main Webpack developer, wrote an article last year on how Webpack and HTTP2 relate: https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-http-2-7083ec3f3ce6 . It's also worth noting that Tobias had only been able to work on Webpack intermittently for the last couple years, until this recent funding allowed him to work on it full-time. Tobias has been writing reports on what he's been doing [0]. Also, grants and full-time development is enabling the team to work on projects like integrating WebAssembly support directly into Webpack [1]. [0] https://medium.com/webpack/the-chunk-graph-algorithm-week-26-29-7c88aa… [1] https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-freelancing-log-book-week-17-482331…

They made it faster, but per the V4 announcement: PS: we haven’t implemented Multicore, or Persistent Caching yet (slated for version 5). This means that there is still lots of room for improvement!!!! It _is_ coming, which I'm excited about. https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-4-released-today-6cdb994702d4

It was released 3 weeks ago: https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-4-released-today-6cdb994702d4

Yes. https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-http-2-7083ec3f3ce6 To quote the article: There is still a protocol overhead for each request compared to a single concatenated file. The compression of the single large file is better than many small files. Servers are slower serving many small files than a single large file.

Hi @mbrumlow. Sean here from the webpack team. We did a lot of study and testing on HTTP/2 and we found that your claims are entirely incorrect. But don't take my word for it, see the stats! https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-http-2-7083ec3f3ce6 HOWEVER! HTTP/2 and webpack become even more powerful when used together! This is something we are really excited to share and build on!

You can also run your build in chrome canary and step through in the debugger: https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-bits-learn-and-debug-webpack-with-c…

Rollup and webpack serve two somewhat different purposes: https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-and-rollup-the-same-but-different-a…

Sorry to be a party pooper again, but https://esdiscuss.org/topic/es8-proposal-optional-static-typing and https://ecmascript-daily.github.io/pages/status-of-static-typing-in-ec… ... I'd like to see that myself, but what can you do... I'm learning Rust instead to use this in wasm. With new webpack initiative https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-awarded-125-000-from-moss-program-f… it's looking good.

Webpack blogged about this in their blog here: https://medium.com/webpack/trivago-helps-secure-webpacks-future-73a58a… I am working for trivago. If you have any questions, i can answer them or forward them to the right team to get the answer. AMA!

This Webpack movement makes more sense. https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-awarded-125-000-from-moss-program-f…

Soon with the new webpack-cli, you'll just be able to 'webpack init': https://medium.com/webpack/announcing-the-new-webpack-cli-75ce1d9b8663

webpack does this on their open collective: https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-2-2-the-final-release-76c3d43bf144

Sorry for the late reply. Multiplexing is not a panacea, there's still some overhead, and even if there wasn't there's still a point where you start to lose lot of performance by limiting gzip compression (the smaller the file the less efficient the compression is). You can read more about why we'll always need a bundling step at the following links: http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/js-packaging-http2.htm https://medium.com/@asyncmax/the-right-way-to-bundle-your-assets-for-f… https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-http-2-7083ec3f3ce6#.74q6ro5kl

The blog post for the release [1] and the migration guide [2] will give you a good idea: [1] https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-2-2-the-final-release-76c3d43bf144#… [2] https://webpack.js.org/guides/migrating/

Most likely? None at all. But it might ensure the long-term survival of some popular libraries that could otherwise eventually die off (kinda like Apache). Case in point: https://medium.com/webpack/sustaining-webpack-for-the-future-part-2-70…

I wish we had more historical overviews like this. The number of new developers has been outstripping the number of old developers in most environments and this has been happening for at least the last 15 years. Thus, we come back to Richard P. Gabriel's Worse is Better, or at least the essay's focus on the importance of social components of a project[1]. N.B.: not implying Redux is worse than any of the other discussed projects. Newer generations cannot possibly have the time to go through the history and tradeoffs of various frameworks that used to be extremely popular and the reasons people moved on. Too many previous frameworks and too few posts like what you just wrote. Besides, where to start? It's not like TAOCP is going to have a chronology of Browser UI frameworks. Instead, the tendency is to leverage the rapidly developing ecosystem and work with the projects that have the largest numbers of stars on github, etc. If you are a very large well heeled eng. organization with a capability to enforce the use of particular frameworks, it is in your interest to popularize them. You will pay and encourage your engineering org to, among other things they do, market it to the dev. community. If there are enough engineers in your org (say: tens of thousands), you will begin exerting a tremendous concentrated influence on the Open Source community. At the same time, for everyone else who does notwork inside a 10K+ engineer org, the lack of future maintenance and upgrades…