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Brunch vs Webpack: What are the differences?
Brunch: Ultra-fast HTML5 build tool. Brunch is an assembler for HTML5 applications. It's agnostic to frameworks, libraries, programming, stylesheet & templating languages and backend technology; Webpack: A bundler for javascript and friends. 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.
Brunch and Webpack can be categorized as "JS Build Tools / JS Task Runners" tools.
"Easy and awesome" is the primary reason why developers consider Brunch over the competitors, whereas "Most powerful bundler" was stated as the key factor in picking Webpack.
Brunch and Webpack are both open source tools. It seems that Webpack with 49.5K GitHub stars and 6.22K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Brunch with 6.58K GitHub stars and 461 GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, Webpack has a broader approval, being mentioned in 2181 company stacks & 1297 developers stacks; compared to Brunch, which is listed in 14 company stacks and 9 developer stacks.
The developer experience Webpack gave us was not delighting anyone. It works and is stable and consistent. It is also slow and frustrating. We decided to check out Vite as an alternative when moving to Vue 3 and have been amazed. It is very early in development and there are plenty of rough edges, but it has been a breath of fresh air not waiting for anything to update. It is so fast we have found ourselves using devtools in browser less because changing styles is just as fast in code. We felt confident using the tool because although it is early in its development, the production build is still provided by Rollup which is a mature tool. We also felt optimistic that as good as it is right now, it will only continue to get better, as it is being worked on very actively. So far we are really happy with the choice.
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 thannpm 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.
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.
Pros of Brunch
- Easy and awesome13
- Ultra Fast9
- Light Configuration9
- Built-in dev server with live reload4
- Simple to use3
- Has many pre-configurable framework "skeletons"2
Pros of Webpack
- Most powerful bundler308
- Built-in dev server with livereload181
- Can handle all types of assets142
- Easy configuration87
- Laravel-mix22
- Overengineered, Underdeveloped4
- Makes it easy to bundle static assets2
- Webpack-Encore2
- Redundant1
- Better support in Browser Dev-Tools1
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Cons of Brunch
Cons of Webpack
- Hard to configure15
- No clear direction5
- Spaghetti-Code out of the box2
- SystemJS integration is quite lackluster2
- Loader architecture is quite a mess (unreliable/buggy)2
- Fire and Forget mentality of Core-Developers2