Some stats not mentioned in the post. Create React App (webpack) vs Vite (esbuild) on Replit containers:
- 1 second start up time on Vite vs 15 seconds for CRA
- React.js hello world project is 234mb on CRA and only 34mb on Vite
- 1GB RAM for Vite dev server vs 3GB+ for CRA
This is a perfect example of how fast and efficient tools can be, and I think we can do even better! Super excited about the future of JavaScript tooling ecosystem with more focus on efficiency and speed.
In addition to the UX win, and I wish we measured this, but I bet this saved us thousands of dollars in monthly cloud spend.
I’d like to see non-CRA numbers: I’ve found that a simple React + Webpack 5 project is not as bad to get off the ground as it used to be.
Exactly: 99% of the time, "webpack is slow" is just code for "I have Babel in my toolchain" and forgetting to set ts-loader as "transpile only".
Personally I removed it years ago, and Webpack 5 even allowed me to get rid of more loaders now that there are Assets Modules that automatically detect assets and webworkers using the "new URL()" syntax, and Typescript does everything else I need.
I can remove babel in my code?
It depends on your target platform: ES6 modules are basically supported in every browser I care about, so the major reason for Babel is JSX
Also if JSX or similar JS extensions are the only thing you need tramspiling for, you might want to look at Sucrase [1] as a fast alternative to Babel.