Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

@3TomatoesShort My reason for concluding 'EDS' was basically watching https://youtu.be/3tr1RvErGn8, playing along at home, and getting several full bingo cards in the process (though the suspicions had been there for longer)

@serapath Just a .concat wouldn't be enough because it doesn't create a module scope; that's what the small amount of additional wiring is for, but that's also just strings

@serapath Neither Browserify nor Webpack do code transformation (or at least for Webpack that's true in its initial version). Both just do concatenation.

Both support plugins, which *can* do code transformation, but that happens entirely outside of the bundler.

@serapath Like, to be explicit about this: bundling code does not require *any* kind of code parsing or processing beyond identifying require/import calls, which can be done even if with a regex if you want. Which I believe is exactly what Browserify does, too.

@serapath None of those things (code transforms, tree shaking, minifying) are bundling. Source map generation is only a part of bundling insofar it describes the mapping from many files to one JS file.

Calling code transforms 'bundling' is like saying that Make 'compiles' your code. It doesn't. It just invokes the thing that does, if that's what you tell it to do in the process.

(Notably, switching from bundles to manifests also removes exactly zero of those things-that-are-not-bundling from your build stack)

@serapath Generating manifest files is functionally the same thing as bundling. "Bundling" is nothing more than statically traversing the dependency tree and string-concatenating the results with a minimal amount of boilerplate code to make the references work.

I don't know where people are getting this idea that bundling is some kind of highly complex or objectionable or slow process. It's kind of bizarre.

@clarfonthey That's a whole different discussion, though, that isn't really relevant for my original post - which is that bundling is, itself, fundamentally a very simple operation (it's basically somewhat structured string concatenation) and there is no reason for people to reinvent that wheel 10 times.

@clarfonthey Bundlers have never been slow. You can bundle the frontend code for whole production sites in under like 400ms. The slow part was always all of the shit that people inserted *into* the bundling process (like code analysis, minification, etc.)

@serapath Bundlers are necessary because traversing a dependency graph over a high-latency link like the network is fundamentally not viable.

The problem I am talking about is not the existence of bundlers; it's that there are so many, and that most of them bring absolutely nothing to the table that wasn't already possible in their predecessor.

@pseudoramble (It's also achievable through a rule in uBlock Origin, using the mechanism that it uses for tracker sites - which presents an interstitial telling you that it was blocked, and whether you want to proceed)

@pseudoramble I *think* LeechBlock can do this, but I don't remember whether it was that or StayFocusd (the Chromium equivalent).