Prepack vs Webpack

Overview

Webpack

Stacks45.0K

Followers28.1K

Votes752

GitHub Stars65.7K

Forks9.2K

Prepack

Stacks52

Followers75

Votes3

Prepack vs Webpack: What are the differences?

Introduction

Key differences between Prepack and Webpack are crucial for developers to understand as they serve different purposes in the web development process.

Execution Environment: Prepack is a tool that optimizes JavaScript code by pre-evaluating and precompiling it during build time, resulting in optimized code ready for production. On the other hand, Webpack is a module bundler that bundles various assets, including JavaScript files, for use in a web application.
Target Audience: Prepack is more suitable for optimizing and improving the performance of JavaScript code for production environments by applying various optimizations. In contrast, Webpack is aimed at developers who need to manage and bundle various modules and assets to enhance the development process.
Optimization Focus: Prepack focuses on optimization techniques such as constant folding, partial evaluation, and dead code elimination to improve the efficiency of JavaScript code. In contrast, Webpack focuses on bundling, code splitting, and module resolution to simplify the development and deployment process.
Integration with Tools: Prepack can be integrated into the build process of other tools like Webpack to further optimize the output code. In comparison, Webpack integrates seamlessly with various plugins and loaders to enhance its functionality and cater to specific project requirements.
Module Handling: Webpack primarily focuses on bundling modules and assets, supporting features like lazy loading and tree shaking to optimize the module dependency graph. Prepack, on the other hand, focuses on optimizing the JavaScript code itself, independent of module bundling concerns.
Output Handling: Prepack outputs optimized JavaScript code that is more performant for production use, while Webpack outputs bundled assets optimized for efficient loading and execution in web applications.

In Summary, understanding the key differences between Prepack and Webpack is essential for developers to choose the right tool for optimizing and managing JavaScript code and assets in their web development projects.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Webpack, Prepack

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.

301k views301k

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.

224k views224k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Webpack	Prepack
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.	Prepack is a partial evaluator for JavaScript. Prepack rewrites a JavaScript bundle, resulting in JavaScript code that executes more efficiently. For initialization-heavy code, Prepack works best in an environment where JavaScript parsing is effectively cached.
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	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars 65.7K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 9.2K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 45.0K	Stacks 52
Followers 28.1K	Followers 75
Votes 752	Votes 3
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 Fire and Forget mentality of Core-Developers 2 Loader architecture is quite a mess (unreliable/buggy) 2 Spaghetti-Code out of the box	Pros 1 Gulp package available 1 Easy setup but has a very limited range of use cases 1 Available as NPM
Integrations
JavaScript	npm

What are some alternatives to Webpack, Prepack?

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.

Underscore

A JavaScript library that provides a whole mess of useful functional programming helpers without extending any built-in objects.

Deno

It is a secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript built with V8, Rust, and Tokio.

Chart.js

Visualize your data in 6 different ways. Each of them animated, with a load of customisation options and interactivity extensions.

Brunch

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

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.

Immutable.js

Immutable provides Persistent Immutable List, Stack, Map, OrderedMap, Set, OrderedSet and Record. They are highly efficient on modern JavaScript VMs by using structural sharing via hash maps tries and vector tries as popularized by Clojure and Scala, minimizing the need to copy or cache data.

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.

Related Comparisons

Prepack vs Webpack: What are the differences?

Introduction

Key differences between Prepack and Webpack are crucial for developers to understand as they serve different purposes in the web development process.

Execution Environment: Prepack is a tool that optimizes JavaScript code by pre-evaluating and precompiling it during build time, resulting in optimized code ready for production. On the other hand, Webpack is a module bundler that bundles various assets, including JavaScript files, for use in a web application.
Target Audience: Prepack is more suitable for optimizing and improving the performance of JavaScript code for production environments by applying various optimizations. In contrast, Webpack is aimed at developers who need to manage and bundle various modules and assets to enhance the development process.
Optimization Focus: Prepack focuses on optimization techniques such as constant folding, partial evaluation, and dead code elimination to improve the efficiency of JavaScript code. In contrast, Webpack focuses on bundling, code splitting, and module resolution to simplify the development and deployment process.
Integration with Tools: Prepack can be integrated into the build process of other tools like Webpack to further optimize the output code. In comparison, Webpack integrates seamlessly with various plugins and loaders to enhance its functionality and cater to specific project requirements.
Module Handling: Webpack primarily focuses on bundling modules and assets, supporting features like lazy loading and tree shaking to optimize the module dependency graph. Prepack, on the other hand, focuses on optimizing the JavaScript code itself, independent of module bundling concerns.
Output Handling: Prepack outputs optimized JavaScript code that is more performant for production use, while Webpack outputs bundled assets optimized for efficient loading and execution in web applications.

Prepack vs Webpack

Overview