Looking at Vite.js?

[richb-hanover]

Is anyone looking at Vite.js?

Its claim to fame is that it relies on ES Modules to skip the process of building an entire binary Javascript thingie during development. Instead the browser uses hot-reloading to pull in the files that have changed, taking fractions of a second to update when a source file changes.

My reading of the documentation is that it's straightforward to take a React project and switch the tooling to Vite. And for production builds, Vite uses esbuild as an alternative to Webpack. esbuild is notable for being an order of magnitude faster building the final distribution files.

I might take a look at this in my spare time, if no one else is interested in tackling the project. Thanks

[max-sixty]

Generally, it would be great to replace the current wasm-react-scripts with something else — this is forked version of another package which isn't supported and has lots of old dependencies. IIUC it uses webpack.

I think Vite may be interesting — I don't know enough to have a view on whether it's the "best" solution, but likely it's at least a reasonable choice. ruff's playground uses it.

[vanillajonathan]

Yes, Vite is quite nice and it is easy to switch to the tooling.

Something else that is nice is Bun which is a drop-in replacement for Node.js, so it is very easy to use too, and it is very fast.

[richb-hanover]

@vanillajonathan I had delusions of having time to think about this, but "stuff" keeps cropping up. If either of these is interesting, feel free to jump in. Otherwise, we can leave this idea in the queue until we get around to it. :-)

[max-sixty]

I'd be fine with bun / vite if they work well! FWIW I think most of the build time is taken up by wasm-opt rather than the npm build steps, though those are material too.

I'm be predominantly interested in replacing the wasm-react-scripts dependency, since that's the piece that's not maintained. To the extent those are correlated (or someone would just prefer to do the work on the npm-equivalent side), then great.

[richb-hanover]

For any brave archaeologists out there... Look at Cosmian/create-react-app@cb7608d for an upgrade to wasm-react-scripts 5.0.4

[max-sixty]

Ah, good point, I just put in #3565 to upgrade it

[richb-hanover]

To close this out, we recently incorporated Vite.js into the build system. It works great, and seems to have removed the reliance on wasm-react-scripts