esbuild: Speed and Limitations
Use esbuild as a standalone bundler and understand why it is orders of magnitude faster than webpack, plus its current limitations around plugins and types.
What Is esbuild?
esbuild is a bundler and minifier written in Go. It's 10-100x faster than JavaScript-based bundlers because of native multi-threading and zero startup overhead. Created by Evan Wallace (Figma).
Speed Benchmarks
Bundling React's source (around 6 MB): esbuild ~0.4s, Webpack ~9s, Rollup ~6s, Parcel ~10s. The speed comes from: Go (compiled), parallelism, no AST conversion between passes, simple architecture.
All lessons in this course
- Vite: Plugin System and SSR Mode
- esbuild: Speed and Limitations
- pnpm Workspaces for Monorepos
- Turbo: Caching and Task Pipelines