Webpack in 5 Years?

So, my title is actually Webpack in Five Years, but actually that's only a click bait, so I looked you in. will talk about the last 10 years of Webpack and what we can learn for Webpack and for the community as a whole and for the ecosystem about these last 10 years. What mistakes we made, what problems we have, and what we can do better.

Oh, come on. So, my name is Tobias Koppers and I created Webpack in 2012, like 10 years from now, so maintenance, maintaining it for 10 years and I started with maintaining it for five years in part time, like 10 hours per week, and then I migrated to full time working on Webpack funded from Open Collective, from sponsors, donations and stuff like that, and now I work more than one year for And maintain it as part of my job. I also have two children, five and three years, and live in Germany in Bavaria, so nearby a little bit.

So 10 years of Webpack, I think we should celebrate that and it's actually a pretty long time for the web ecosystem, like 10 years, in web years it's like hundreds of years or so, and I think we can say that we at least shape the ecosystem a little bit and I try to find four things that we, I think Webpack shaped the way we develop web applications. So one thing, why I started Webpack was to add code splitting to bundlers and on-demand loading and I think that's something that has been established in the community since then and I think that it's there to stay here and nowadays, every bundler is coming with code splitting on-demand loading and nearly everyone is using something like that. Another thing we did promote or embrace is having this idea of combining, co-locating your style sheets, your assets and your other non-JavaScript stuff with your JavaScript modules. So it's like having one graph of your application where everything is imported by each other and I think that's also something that will stay in the community and even specs involved like CSS modules spec and other things that embrace it and keep that in the ecosystem forever. And another little bit smaller thing is that we also learn to use like bundlers or pre-processing tools for server-side processing or Node.js. So often in an application that using Webpack and server-side rendering and stuff like that, then we also bundle our application on server-side, so that something that wasn't there before Webpack, probably because we didn't need that, but I think that's also something that will probably stay in the community at least for a while and another larger thing that I think Webpack embraced is flexibility. Webpack started with really a flexible way, a large plugin system with huge abilities to extend and configure and customize your build and I think that's something that really embraced the innovation in the ecosystem and new solution, new ideas can be developed combined with Webpack and also shapes new ideas in the ecosystem. So I think that's pretty good. But nowadays Webpack isn't the most hyped Bundler anymore, it's like more boring tools, maybe the stable choice or the choice if you already have something with Webpack, but in the Twitter ecosystem also, it's a hype-based development team, there are new Bundlers that come up, or new non-bundling tools that are pretty hyped and make good things, and probably everyone has a feature that's better than something in Webpack, and maybe performance or optimizing or something, so that's pretty much the hyped kind of things coming up. And I still think Webpack is still the solid choice when you want to have something that is really stable or really flexible, and maybe covers a lot of use cases, or you have a lot of ecosystem plugins you want to use. And actually, I looked at the NPM downloads, and Webpack is still growing, so it's not that it's declining or something that's happening here, but yes, we see that there is a lot of new stuff coming up in the ecosystem.

So, what does the future look like for Webpack and for the ecosystem in general? Will Webpack still be used in five years? I think yes, at least for existing projects, because, like, companies, teams, don't change the stack so often, it's more like they use stuff for more years than we can think of. Actually, people are still using Webpack 2, which is five years old, and they don't mind not upgrading stuff for a long time, if it's working, and I think it's deemed to work, at least. For new projects, there's another choice. I don't know what is happening in five years. It could be that something new is developed that might be better, or there are obvious other choices you can use and start with new projects. What happens in five years, I don't know. It's a really long time in the ecosystem. I decided to recap about the last ten years of Webpack and check what lessons we can learn from these ten years, and what we can, I can think what we can keep from Webpack, ten years of Webpack for the ecosystem and for Webpack in general. So, yeah. I also want to say what we can do now or we can do in future tools on Webpack to fix these problems or to keep these lessons learned. The problem is there are so many lessons I collected preparing this talk that they actually don't fit in this talk. It's a hybrid conference, but what I did was prepared hundreds of slides for all this stuff and I showed them a split second and the remote audience can pause the stream and read all this stuff and see you in one hour after I discuss the important ones with the live audience. So the first one, initial configurations.

So currently people often think that the initial configuration you need to get started with the project is too overwhelming, too large, too much stuff needed, and actually it didn't used to be that way in Webpack. When Webpack started you didn't need any configuration, it's just working with like a simple CLI command, but it actually was that we five years ago, we didn't develop that complex Web applications. Like nowadays everyone needs to use CSS, JavaScript, assets, they want to process image optimizing, they want JavaScript dialect like TypeScript or want to use stage three features that need to be transpiled for older bosses. They want to integrate extra compilers for their framework like React comes with JSX syntax, Svelte comes with a different compiler to compile the templates, Angular has like a preprocessing step for the production bits. Vue also has this cool single components, single file components which need to be processed. So there was a lot of tools added to like the web applications and Webpack didn't adapt to that a little bit, so it's kept having not really low defaults that are used that way.

So what can we do to fix that? Clickers not good. So I think we should be more optimized, in having defaults so we should adapt with the ecosystem. I also think we should acknowledge the fact that these defaults change over time, like ten years from now, maybe five years from now, we have probably very different defaults than we now have. What I think we can do is like having something, what some people already do, is having presets that are versionised with dependencies, so we can slowly adapt with the ecosystem, but also keep your project locked in a certain version of defaults without having a lot of breaking changes.

Another topic is customising. So I think customising is really important, and also really important for the ecosystem, even if you're not directly using it for your project, because it embraces this innovation concept of the ecosystem where you can look, like you have a cool idea and can write a plugin for your bundler and for your tooling, and, like, try it out, maybe publish it to npm, and let people use it, maybe it becomes the new standard we develop applications in the future. But it also helps to unblock users. If you're struggling with something that Bundler doesn't support, or your tool doesn't support, then you can actually go into modify, write a plugin, or customise the configuration to, like, have your use case, like, doing what you do, and actually get stuck with Bundler, and maybe have to switch because it doesn't support something. I also think that was one success factor of Webpack in the early days, and maybe also nowadays that it really has this idea of flexibility and customising and stuff like that. And, but it also is confusing in some kind of things, like, there are three levels of customising. You have configuration, you have plugins, you have loaders. It is really complicated when you have to use the plugin loader combination with some configuration to do something, so it can be confusing. Another thing is that the API is, you can extend everything in Webpack. You have access to all the internals in Webpack. That's a problem because we don't know what is actually used. We can't change anything in our internal API, and that is really hard for us and also like makes easy to break stuff because it could change internals and that's weird. Yes. So, what can we do? So, what can we do? I think the idea is we shouldn't have this kind of plug in concept. I think it should only be like one plug in type which maybe has multiple levels of APIs. Like you have like a low level API and a higher level API where you can access both of these APIs from one single plug in and that would make it easier for people to use. Also makes the API surface more constrained to like only expose what we actually know is use by plug ins and don't expose all the internals which makes it hard for us to iterate on internals. What would also help, but it's really difficult to embrace in the communities like having some analytics where we actually get feedback from the user, maybe automated or maybe by opt in or something like that, where you can report what are the actually APIs used by plug ins so we can know what we should improve or what we can drop or duplicate in the future.

Another really large topic is performance. So like most competitors excel in performance because they are written in native languages and compared to Webpack, which is Node.js, Webpack is really bad at performance.

It doesn't used to be the way. So if ten years ago nobody or less people complained about performance and it was fine. But at least in larger scale there are problems with performance because of reasons. Probably the most problematic stuff is that we are struggling with garbage collect a lot because of large model graphs which create a lot of objects and that is bad and using Javascript makes it difficult to leverage multiple CPUs to do computations. But there are also architectural problems. Our architecture is really built for flexibility. On each compilation we built up everything from the start. We have the best ability for plugins, the easiest way for plugins to make their changes but that is not the best architecture for performance. It would be really better to have some kind of incremental processing, optimised architecture.

So what we need to do, what we should do, but it is really difficult to fix that in Webpack is better it would be to use a native language, so that we can leverage multiple CPUs and also start with architecture that have this incremental build by design, like having it not depend on application size. It also brings me to the next point that is large-scale applications. Like, actually applications get bigger and bigger and that is a problem because the performance problems in Webpack are really exposed, because in Webpack, it is kind of fast for incremental build, but a little bit, it scales by application size and that gets more serious when the application grows, and there are workarounds where you can split your applications in multiple small applications, or even something like lazy compilation where you only compile on development what you're actually using. That helps, but there are workarounds, and if we have an architecture that would scale with applications in a better way.

What I think we should do is, like, lazy must be default for the future, like everything should be lazy-computated and lazy just scales better with large applications, because then you probably don't work on the whole application at once, like we work on parts of that, and if you only need to compile that part, then the large scale of the application doesn't become so serious. And, yeah, what I always say, we should embrace an architecture where the incremental performance doesn't scale with the application size, it should be constant at all this, and it should be fast always. That would be great. I also think, like, if you embrace incremental stuff, you should also embrace it on everywhere, like production build should be incremental on CI, it should be incremental, dev build should be incremental, which they are, but we should be incremental everywhere, and we should also have less ways to opt out of incrementally, like, if you change the parentheses, why does it have to reset the cache? It should keep being incremental. That would be cool.

So, back to the slides. Okay, so, these problems with performance and architecture, we can't really change that in Webpack. We can't refactor the whole architecture and rewrite in the native language that would break every plugin, every loader, every user, and maybe every in-style processor and stuff like that. So, it actually would make more sense to create a new stuff which would maybe WhoopPack or something, and that would have this new architecture. But there are trade-offs with that, and I try to summarise it a little bit. So, what fixing problems, we have a rewrite, does it make sense? So, when we fix the problems, we actually would keep the ecosystem, the trust, and the adoption of Webpack, while a rewrite would lose all the ecosystem, the plugins and loaders would be lost on this rewrite, and we need to regain adoption for Webpack, and, yes, that is hard, and it would take more than five years, probably, and it is also hard to make a migration for users to migrate to something like Webpack. Yes. But on the other side, we can't fix everything in Webpack, what we learnt, we can't change the architecture, we can't constrain the API surface, because it would also break all the So, it is impossible to fix some problems in existing Webpack.

But there are trade-offs with that, and I try to summarise it a little bit. So, what fixing problems, we have a rewrite, does it make sense? So, when we fix the problems, we actually would keep the ecosystem, the trust, and the adoption of Webpack, while a rewrite would lose all the ecosystem, the plugins and loaders would be lost on this rewrite, and we need to regain adoption for Webpack, and, yes, that is hard, and it would take more than five years, probably, and it is also hard to make a migration for users to migrate to something like Webpack. Yes. But on the other side, we can't fix everything in Webpack, what we learnt, we can't change the architecture, we can't constrain the API surface, because it would also break all the So, it is impossible to fix some problems in existing Webpack. While in rewrite, we could optimise our architecture for incremental builds, we could fix these deeper problems on the performance side, but is it worth it? I don't know. That's a good question. Yes, on the other side, like, fixing problems could also, like, fixing the larger problems also has also a little bit of risk of breaking users while rewriting would break, like, every user, obviously. Actually, it wouldn't break users. You could keep using Webpack and migrate to Webpack later, so it makes sense. It is also hard to do a rewrite because it would like take maybe years to rewrite everything. You have like the same abilities of Webpack while in fixing problems in Webpack, it would make smaller steps towards the process and like make direct benefits for the users and that can also be done with a smaller team and rewriting would be complicated. So trade-offs, as always. So thank you. I guess we have some questions? Thank you. So for those of you who have questions, don't forget you can go to slide.do and enter the code 1620 to ask your questions and then I can ask them to Tobias right here. So first question is from Ro. Would you recommend starting new React projects with Webpack and if yes, why? Yeah, I would recommend that because I created Webpack. I think it's like a matter of flavor, I guess. So Webpack is probably the solid choice, a good choice if you want to have a stable choice. You can start with other bundles. I actually don't know what are the limitations of them. So you could run into something and they are younger, so you can start with them. And I guess you can also always start with something else and then change the stack later. So it's like fee-fee. So the answer is, as a proper developer says, it depends. So for the people that want to go to the other track for the next talk. You can switch now because we're going to start that in a few minutes. And you can of course stay here also. And next question is from Rob also, why should you use React? Why? Why should you use Webpack as a React developer? So what benefit does Webpack bring you as a React developer? Yeah, it has a lot of ecosystem, and you have had large prebuilt solutions for React. So you can just start with a boilerplate or with tools that exist in the ecosystem.

It's easy to get started with Webpack. And it also works well, I think. And it used to work well for like five years or so. So I guess it's a good choice and makes sense. It's a proven technology. Yeah, proven technology. All right.

An anonymous question. The ideas of solving Webpack issues sound great. Does a roadmap exist for currently implementing those, and should we expect more improvements in future versions? Yeah, we don't have a roadmap, an official roadmap, so it's like we never had one. It's more like we do what we think is currently best for the ecosystem. So it's like we're trying to improve those problems incrementally, and that's basically a roadmap. And yeah, I summarized these challenges and problems in the talk, and I guess we can fix some of these problems right now. And many of them are kind of not that complicated to fix, like making defaults is something we could do. So I think that's going to be happen probably. Someday soon. Someday soon, yeah. But we don't have timelines, or we never had timelines for everything because it's like great pressure, and we don't want to have this pack-out. It's an open source project, and many, most of the contributors are working on free time on that. So it's not something that we want to create deadlines and it's no need to have deadlines for us. It's like-

So beside you, how many people work on Webpack full-time? Yeah, not that many. It's like two people working full time on Webpack. So me and somebody else. But it's a little bit problematic because like we also have less funding last time. So it's like, it's the winter for JavaScript ecosystem mostly, and yeah it might be a problem in the future that we have two small teams to make larger improvements. Yeah, it's weird that basically 9 out of 10 companies run on Webpack and you have to run from open source contribution space. Yeah, that's the problem. So I think open source has a really hard time to get funded and I guess there's also a discussion about that today, so feel free to join me there. Alright.

I think we're gonna do one last question. Question is from Thomas. Where do you see yourselves standing against new building tools leveraging new browser features like feats? I think we will do something to make similar choices. So actually, probably we copy or steal stuff from new bundles, so it's not criminal. I think that's the benefit of the open-source ecosystem, you're actually allowed to steal or copy stuff. I also think these tools copied a lot from Webpack so it's not that there's only one way. I think more like an ecosystem, the Web ecosystem, and we all benefit from these competitors and we benefit as ecosystem as a whole from these developments and new ideas and new technologies emerge, that all will benefit from them. Yeah I guess that's a good way to go about it, you have to share from each other. That was all the time we have for Q&A, if you want to continue the conversation you can go to the monetization of open-source discussion room and right now you're going to go to the speaker lounge where people can also continue. See you there.