EXPOSITION OF FRONTEND BUILD SYSTEMS

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

Frontend build systems evolved as JavaScript codebases grew larger and developer needs became more complex. They consist of three steps: transpilation to address unsupported language features, bundling to reduce network requests, and minification to decrease file sizes. These steps are facilitated by tools like Babel, SWC, and Webpack, among others, and enhanced by developer tools like meta-frameworks, sourcemaps, hot module replacement, and monorepo tools.