ForSpareParts

As somebody who is currently trying to use structured markdown in obsidian for knowledge management and finding it a bit challenging, I agree with the author that markdown is not the ideal language for what he and I are trying to do with it, and that we'd probably be better served by something else. But I'm not necessarily convinced such a language would find a lot of adoption, because I suspect that most people using markdown aren't doing what we're doing, and are quite well served by what's there. Actually, I'm one of those people about 90% of the time -- I have never thought about any of this stuff while writing a readme or a forum post, and that's what MD is actually for. How many users are out there clamoring for a completely unambiguous markup language optimized for parsing and extensibility?

Webpack really messed up IMO -- v5 took a really, really long time to drop because they were making huge changes ostensibly for performance... and then when it came out it actually made performance worse for many projects. I think they've fixed that now, but the damage is done.

I think building js in js is just not fast enough anymore, everyone is moving towards compiled languages for building their apps. The next winner in the space will be something like vite that uses a compiled language under the hood (vite uses esbuild, which is written in Go).

It serves unbundled for development and bundled in production. In practice this works pretty well as long as you do decent code splitting (and you should be doing code splitting!)

Edit: lol I should have read your post more closely. Yes, the different strategies can cause bugs; there's much more shared between the two pipelines than there used to be so this situation is improving. We actually had really bad compatibility with problems six months ago and it was still easily worth the trouble for the performance improvement.

I really do believe this is getting better -- though not at a rate where it's obvious yet if you aren't plugged in.

A few years ago there were tons of frameworks and they all worked a bit differently. New shit every week. IMO that's because no one had really figured out the right paradigm yet. Now we have (it's components) and the framework race has slowed way down (it's pretty much React, Vue, and Angular now). Even big changes in React like Hooks didn't break backwards compatibility. You can move pretty slow and steady on that front, if you want to.

Tooling is the next frontier. It's become obvious that compiling js in js itself is just not performant enough for large applications. We need a faster solution. There are a few contenders right now (esbuild, swc, bun; vite wraps esbuild) but I suspect within two years we'll have a pretty clear winner.

In general I think things move faster when we haven't found the right ideas yet, and that's why backend is more stable -- it's just older. There has been more time to iterate and figure out what works and what doesn't. Frontend will probably always be more chaotic than backend, but I think it'll be much less so as we start to agree on the web want it to look like.

The description is maybe a little misleading. Vite is a development experience improvement for existing frontend frameworks; most people using it are on React or Vue (which is the other of the "big 3" along with React and Angular). It's about making projects build and start faster.