ES6 modules support lands in browsers: is it time to rethink bundling?

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Modules, as in, this kind of syntax right in JavaScript:

import { myCounter, someOtherThing } from 'utilities';

Which we’d normally use Webpack to bundle, but now is supported in Safari Technology Preview, Firefox Nightly (flag), and Edge.

It’s designed to support progressive enhancement, as you can safely link to a bundled version and a non-bundled version without having browsers download both.

Stefan Judis shows:

<!-- in case ES6 modules are supported -->
<script src="app/index.js" type="module"></script>
<!-- in case ES6 modules aren't supported -->
<script src="dist/bundle.js" defer nomodule></script>

Not bundling means simpler build processes, which is great, but forgoing all the other cool stuff a tool like Webpack can do, like “tree shaking”. Also, all those imports are individual HTTP requests, which may not be as big of a deal in HTTP/2, but still isn’t great:

Khan Academy discovered the same thing a while ago when experimenting with HTTP/2. The idea of shipping smaller files is great to guarantee perfect cache hit ratios, but at the end, it’s always a tradeoff and it’s depending on several factors. For a large code base splitting the code into several chunks (a vendor and an app bundle) makes sense, but shipping thousands of tiny files that can’t be compressed properly is not the right approach.

Preprocessing build steps are likely here to stay. Native tech can learn from them, but we might as well leverage what both are good at.

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