I’ve gotten so tired of the near infinite complexity of the angular / react / webpack / typescript / sass projects at work that for my home projects I’m now exploring no build tool solutions. Modern browsers are now so powerful that a lot of the things we needed build tools for no longer apply:

- http/2 multiplexing has made it unnecessary to limit the number of script or css files loaded at once. Faster connections together with http/2 mean payload splitting is no longer necessary for js and css (which means everything can load up front from index.html). Gzipping removes the need for minification.

- Any npm package can be loaded as script tags or through direct es6 module import from unpkg.com. I use a single ‘externals.js’ which exports those dependencies so I can just do “import { foo } from ‘externals.js’”

- sass is mostly unnecessary thanks to widespread css3 support, @import for modularity (see also http/2), bem notation for namespacing, and css variables for reuse

- es6 is supported in all browsers, so you can write modern code. ES6 modules “just work” if you import from a file path.

- vue and preact are designed to be used without build tools. An app deployed as a static site can use hash routing to need no builds and no server-side router.

Experimenting with this stuff has really made me wonder why we use all of these build tools.

> - vue and preact are designed to be used without build tools. An app deployed as a static site can use hash routing to need no builds and no server-side router.

So is React. JSX and React are 2 different things. But honestly, React without JSX is a pain to write.

Minification and hashing for secure script embedding are still needed, but it could provided directly by a server middleware, depending on the language one uses.

IMHO Typescript is still something useful.

I find typescript useful for libraries, less so for application code.