esbuild

esbuild changed the industry by proving that build tools could be 100x faster if written in Go/Rust. It is not just a bundler but a transpiler.

When to Use

• Pre-bundling: Used by Vite to bundle dependencies.
• Lambda Bundling: Creating small, single-file bundles for AWS Lambda.
• Speed: When Webpack takes 5 mins, esbuild takes 200ms.

Core Concepts

Go

Written in Go, compiled to native code. No JS overhead.

API

Simple, minimal API. esbuild.build({ ... }).