Overview

Webpack

Stacks41.6K

Followers28.1K

Votes752

GitHub Stars65.7K

Forks9.2K

Bazel

Stacks310

Followers579

Votes133

Bazel vs Webpack: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Bazel and Webpack

Bazel and Webpack are both build tools for compiling and bundling code, but they have different approaches and functionalities. Here are the key differences between Bazel and Webpack:

Build System: Bazel is a multi-language build system developed by Google, primarily designed for large-scale projects. It provides a distributed caching mechanism and incremental builds, allowing for fast and efficient build times. On the other hand, Webpack is a module bundler that is mainly used in the JavaScript ecosystem for bundling and optimizing web applications. It focuses on providing a highly customizable and flexible build configuration.
Supported Languages: Bazel supports multiple programming languages such as Java, C++, Python, TypeScript, and more. It enables the creation of monorepos where different languages can coexist and be built together. Webpack, on the other hand, focuses on JavaScript and its ecosystem, including frameworks like React and Vue. It provides loaders and plugins to preprocess and bundle various types of assets such as CSS, images, and fonts.
Dependency Management: Bazel uses a dependency graph to manage dependencies between different targets and provides strict build isolation. It ensures that only the necessary parts of the code are rebuilt when changes occur, resulting in faster build times. Webpack, on the other hand, uses a dependency graph to resolve and bundle JavaScript modules, allowing for efficient code splitting and lazy loading.
Build Performance: Bazel's distributed caching mechanism and incremental builds make it highly performant, especially in large projects where only a small portion of the code changes between builds. It avoids building already built or unchanged code, significantly reducing build times. Webpack also offers optimizations like code splitting and caching, but its performance may degrade in larger projects with frequent changes due to the need to rebuild the entire bundle.
Community and Ecosystem: Bazel has been mainly adopted by large organizations and projects with complex needs, and it has a smaller community compared to Webpack. Webpack, being widely used in the JavaScript ecosystem, has a larger and more active community. This results in a broader range of plugins, loaders, and community-contributed configurations, making it easier to set up and customize builds for different use cases.
Configurability: Bazel has a declarative configuration approach. Build rules are defined in a language-agnostic way using a BUILD file, allowing for clear and reproducible builds. Webpack, on the other hand, provides a flexible and highly configurable JavaScript API for setting up the build configuration. It allows developers to customize various aspects of the build process, such as loaders, plugins, and optimizations, using JavaScript code.

In summary, Bazel is a powerful and efficient build system designed for large-scale projects with multi-language support and strict build isolation. Webpack, on the other hand, is primarily focused on JavaScript and provides a flexible and customizable module bundling solution for web applications. The choice between Bazel and Webpack depends on the specific needs of the project, the size and complexity of the codebase, and the desired level of configurability.

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Advice on Webpack, Bazel

Aleksandr

Contract Software Engineer - Microsoft at Microsoft-365

Dec 23, 2019

Decided

Why migrated?

I could define the next points why we have to migrate:

Decrease build time of our application. (It was the main cause).
Also jspm install takes much more time than npm install.
Many config files for SystemJS and JSPM. For Webpack you can use just one main config file, and you can use some separate config files for specific builds using inheritance and merge them.

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Comments

Abigail

Dec 10, 2019

Decided

We mostly use rollup to publish package onto NPM. For most all other use cases, we use the Meteor build tool (probably 99% of the time) for publishing packages. If you're using Node on FHIR you probably won't need to know rollup, unless you are somehow working on helping us publish front end user interface components using FHIR. That being said, we have been migrating away from Atmosphere package manager towards NPM. As we continue to migrate away, we may publish other NPM packages using rollup.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Webpack	Bazel
A bundler for javascript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets. Code Splitting allows to load parts for the application on demand. Through "loaders" modules can be CommonJs, AMD, ES6 modules, CSS, Images, JSON, Coffeescript, LESS, ... and your custom stuff.	Bazel is a build tool that builds code quickly and reliably. It is used to build the majority of Google's software, and thus it has been designed to handle build problems present in Google's development environment.
Bundles ES Modules, CommonJS, and AMD modules (even combined); Can create a single bundle or multiple chunks that are asynchronously loaded at runtime (to reduce initial loading time); Dependencies are resolved during compilation, reducing the runtime size; Loaders can preprocess files while compiling, e.g. TypeScript to JavaScript, Handlebars strings to compiled functions, images to Base64, etc; Highly modular plugin system to do whatever else your application requires	Multi-language support: Bazel supports Java, Objective-C and C++ out of the box, and can be extended to support arbitrary programming languages;High-level build language: Projects are described in the BUILD language, a concise text format that describes a project as sets of small interconnected libraries, binaries and tests. By contrast, with tools like Make you have to describe individual files and compiler invocations;Multi-platform support: The same tool and the same BUILD files can be used to build software for different architectures, and even different platforms. At Google, we use Bazel to build both server applications running on systems in our data centers and client apps running on mobile phones;Reproducibility: In BUILD files, each library, test, and binary must specify its direct dependencies completely. Bazel uses this dependency information to know what must be rebuilt when you make changes to a source file, and which tasks can run in parallel. This means that all builds are incremental and will always produce the same result;Scalable: Bazel can handle large builds
Statistics
GitHub Stars 65.7K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 9.2K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 41.6K	Stacks 310
Followers 28.1K	Followers 579
Votes 752	Votes 133
Pros & Cons
Pros 309 Most powerful bundler 182 Built-in dev server with livereload 142 Can handle all types of assets 87 Easy configuration 22 Laravel-mix Cons 15 Hard to configure 5 No clear direction 2 Loader architecture is quite a mess (unreliable/buggy) 2 SystemJS integration is quite lackluster 2 Spaghetti-Code out of the box	Pros 28 Fast 20 Deterministic incremental builds 17 Correct 16 Multi-language 14 Enforces declared inputs/outputs Cons 3 No Windows Support 2 Bad IntelliJ support 1 Learning Curve 1 Poor windows support for some languages 1 Lack of Documentation
Integrations
JavaScript	Java Objective-C C++

What are some alternatives to Webpack, Bazel?

gulp

Build system automating tasks: minification and copying of all JavaScript files, static images. More capable of watching files to automatically rerun the task when a file changes.

Grunt

The less work you have to do when performing repetitive tasks like minification, compilation, unit testing, linting, etc, the easier your job becomes. After you've configured it, a task runner can do most of that mundane work for you—and your team—with basically zero effort.

Apache Maven

Maven allows a project to build using its project object model (POM) and a set of plugins that are shared by all projects using Maven, providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds you automatically know how all Maven projects build saving you immense amounts of time when trying to navigate many projects.

Gradle

Gradle is a build tool with a focus on build automation and support for multi-language development. If you are building, testing, publishing, and deploying software on any platform, Gradle offers a flexible model that can support the entire development lifecycle from compiling and packaging code to publishing web sites.

Brunch

Brunch is an assembler for HTML5 applications. It's agnostic to frameworks, libraries, programming, stylesheet & templating languages and backend technology.

Pants

Pants is a build system for Java, Scala and Python. It works particularly well for a source code repository that contains many distinct projects.

Parcel

Parcel is a web application bundler, differentiated by its developer experience. It offers blazing fast performance utilizing multicore processing, and requires zero configuration.

rollup

It is a module bundler for JavaScript which compiles small pieces of code into something larger and more complex, such as a library or application. It uses the new standardized format for code modules included in the ES6 revision of JavaScript, instead of previous idiosyncratic solutions such as CommonJS and AMD.

Backpack

Backpack is minimalistic build system for Node.js. Inspired by Facebook's create-react-app, Zeit's Next.js, and Remy's Nodemon, Backpack lets you create modern Node.js apps and services with zero configuration. Backpack handles all the file-watching, live-reloading, transpiling, and bundling, so you don't have to.