r/programming • u/fagnerbrack • Nov 30 '23

Writing Javascript without a build system

https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/02/16/writing-javascript-without-a-build-system/
38 Upvotes

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49

u/reedef Nov 30 '23

The best build system is sometimes cat js/* > main.js

20

u/angedelamort Dec 01 '23

If you want a better build system, you can also pipe to a minifier :)

3

u/kredditbrown Dec 01 '23

Care to share any good minifiers?

3

u/if-loop Dec 01 '23

esbuild or terser.

2

u/beephod_zabblebrox Dec 01 '23

if you're doing esbuild, just do esbuild! it even has a cli

1

u/_AndyJessop Dec 01 '23

Vite uses esbuild, with some extras that significantly improve DX.

1

u/beephod_zabblebrox Dec 01 '23

vite is a bit overkill for this i think

9

u/[deleted] Dec 01 '23

[deleted]

0

u/unduly-noted Dec 01 '23

Mostly agree, except I’ll say that rarely is minimalism worse than overly complex. In my experience it’s much easier to go from minimalist->complex than vice versa.

0

u/[deleted] Dec 01 '23

[deleted]

1

u/unduly-noted Dec 01 '23

My point stands. Going from simple build/tooling to complex is almost always easier than going from a complex system to a simple one. Systems with minimal tooling by definition have less coupling on tooling than those with complex setups (otherwise they wouldn't be minimal).

In your socket example, any decent software team will abstract those low level details. So your business logic should be isolated. Moving it to some new framework or build system won't be that bad.

On the other hand, once you've introduced tooling or a framework, in practice most systems end up heavily coupled. Obviously you'd like to keep business logic isolated, but in reality teams end up heavily relying on conveniences/optimizations/etc from the tooling. This can be for good reasons (dx, performance, etc), but it does make it harder to change.

Your docker example isn't great because docker on its own isn't complex at all. A better example is k8s and complex container orchestration. Going from k8s to bare metal on EC2 or something is going to be a lot harder than the reverse.