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0 pointstkzed495y ago0 comments

When people are complaining about this kind of stuff at work, it raises the question of what the alternative is. The person you're replying to describes a great methodology for smaller projects, but in many cases there are great reasons to take on dependencies. Not taking a dependency means you pay in person-hours to reinvent it, and sometimes that cost is much higher than a couple extra seconds of build time.

And, once you have a lot of dependencies, ES modules won't save you. People expect web apps to load fast, and code is big. Things like Webpack help make it a lot smaller.

My point isn't that this is good, it's that it's not "indefensible". There are very real practical reasons that big companies deal with the debt of dependencies and bundlers.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

runarberg5y ago· 2 in thread

Many people (including my self at work) handle webpack configs just fine. I started a vue project at work the other day and it was as simple as:

    npx @vue/cli@latest create my-project

This scaffolded a fully configured project with webpack, babel, typescript, eslint, a custom dev server, etc. I think react developers have a similar tool called create-react-app. I personally (or professionally, since I only use this at work; personally I just have an `index.html` and a python server) just let vue-cli handle the webpack config and forget about it. I guess rust developers use cargo to the same manner.

I suspect much of the complain about the complexity of the front-end ecosystem comes from people that either a) don’t do front-end regularly and are trying to build a website for them self but get bad advice for the tools needed, or b) are backend developers at work and think they know better about the front-end then their front-end counterparts. In the case of (a), they simply just need better advice on tooling (and which tools are an overkill), the tone of my original comment was more directed at the other group (b; although the advice I gave was for the former group—whoops).

dmitriid5y ago

> it was as simple as:

This just hides all the complexity behind a yet another layer of abstractions.

The moment something breaks due to a minor upgrade, you're screwed.

lights01235y ago

Although, I do think that Vue handles the webpack config in a great way. I've been using vue-cli to manage my webpack config for years now, and never had a minor upgrade of any dependency break the build. It also provides a nice way to hook into the webpack config, so you can still add your own plugins and loaders without having to opt out of it managing it for you.

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