Using esbuild

esbuild is quite a new tool that focuses on performance. The key to esbuild’s enhanced performance is that it was written from the ground up in the Go programming language. The result is a native binary that has certain advantages over pure JavaScript solutions.

If esbuild stopped at providing a native solution, it would potentially not be qualified to make this list. After all, flexibility and the option to extend the original functionality are key for any kind of bundler. Luckily, the creator of esbuild has thought about this and come up with an elegant solution. While the core of esbuild remains native – that is, written in Go and provided as a binary – plugins can be written using JavaScript. This way, we get the best of both worlds.

To get started with esbuild, we need to install the esbuild package using npm:

$ npm install esbuild --save-dev

With this one installation, you can use esbuild programmatically, as well as directly from...