I have a list of several new tools I keep hearing about but I have no idea how they fit into the ecosystem, what they do or what they are trying to replace:
Snowpack
Rollup
Vite
If you work with one of these I'd love if you could explain it to me like I'm 5.
For context: I work with Yarn as a package manager and I've occasionally worked on projects where assets were compiled with Gulp (build tool?). Most projects I work with are using Webpack (build tool?) in some way or another but I almost never configure it in anyway.
Hi there! Let's start by categorizing them.
Rollup is a bundler. It's comparable to both Parcel and Webpack.
Its goal is to process assets and create a production version of your project, including features such as tree-shaking and chunk-splitting.
Snowpack and Vite.js are both a new generation of frontend tooling, that aims to improve your development experience by not bundling in development.
When building for production, both tools will use a bundler such as Webpack or Rollup to create a final build.
The advantage of no-bundler tools is that the startup time and hot-module-refresh time stays fast even as a project continues to grow.
For example, I use Vite.js during development to serve assets in a Rails app and to build assets for production (which uses Rollup behind the scenes).