BUILD SYSTEMS AND BUNDLERS

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

This article explores the relationship between bundlers and build systems, arguing that bundlers can be viewed as build systems with additional task descriptions. It analyzes various build systems (Make, Excel, Bazel, and Shake) based on their schedulers (topological, restarting, and suspending) and rebuilders (dirty bit, verifying traces, and constructive traces). Bundlers are then examined through this lens, and the approaches in Webpack, Turbopack, Vite, and Rspack are compared. This comparison revealed that many lack features already present in established build systems. A path to having features like minimality, early cutoff, parallelism, and remote caching/execution is presented.