Switch from webpack to esbuild?

[nikolalukovic]

Any thoughts on moving from Webpack to ESBuild? Currently, for big React projects, build times are atrocious. ESBuild seems to significantly improve build times and it already works with React. Is it possible to at least investigate if it is feasible to switch CRA to ESBuild?

[RIP21]

ESBuild is an amazing tool for sure, but to change from Webpack to ESBuild will require A LOT of effort, so it should mature even more IMO.
There is also https://github.com/swc-project/swc project that is focused on replacing Babel for now as is WAY faster than Babel.
That will make compilation WAY faster than Babel so the builds, using Webpack + SWC will be a nice first step and will speed up everything significantly for the huge codebase.

But who knows, maybe Webpack 5 will be much faster than it's now, so slowdown compared to ESBuild will be not that dramatic + federated modules FTW.

Anyway, I really hope that the Typescript compiler and all JS tooling will be rewritten in Go, Rust whatever suits best, so it gets HUGE performant improvements everywhere as, surely JS tools are better and better, still too slow as JS is not a good language to process a lot of text and do a lot of computations.
Some may disagree, but the examples mentioned above show that it's the truth :)

[nikolalukovic]

That also sounds like a great idea, I'm all for it. Even if we're taking smaller steps, I truly believe improvements in compilation/bundling performance of React projects should become a focus in the near future.

[bugzpodder]

i've been using snowpack along-side CRA, which i believe uses esbuild under the hood. I think it's a little bit concerning if you use one tool (esbuild) for dev and another tool for prod (webpack) and there have been cases where there are incompatibilities. snowpack also has build capabilities but have not tried it out yet.

[asherccohen]

Hi everyone, this thread is 11months old, today we have 2 brand new webpack plugins: swc-loader and esbuild-loader.

Any chance we can get one of these (preference is swc-loader) instead of Babel for js and TS transpiration, as well as jest?

The perf boost would be huge!

https://github.com/swc-project/swc-loader

I'm going to fork react-scripts once v5 is stable, then I'll introduce my personal webpack config but would be nice to see it included in the official version!

[ryota-murakami]

@asherccohen I was commented similar intent in this thread.

• We need regualr CRA maintainer #11180

I agree with you that replace Babel from more faster option for the TypeScript even which solution(swc, esBuild) will take.

[adityamatt]

+1