Migrating from Parcel to Snowpack

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I find build tooling endlessly interesting, especially right now as we’re in a juicy next-gen transitional period with players like Vite, wmr, Snowpack, and esbuild. Hugh Haworth has a good run-down of the new players, and we’ve chatted on ShopTalk about them severaltimes. I especially like it when people blog their personal journeys in moving build tools, like Ben Frain has done.

It’s not like buying a new car where the new one is faster, but they both have steering wheels and doors and brake pedals and stuff. They share a similarity in that they are trying to provide DX locally and UX (via performance) on production — otherwise their approach, what they provide, and what they expect are all quite different.

Those differences mean re-training your brain in how you expect things to work. Here’s Ben on Snowpack:

In Snowpack land, your index.html file needs to reference the transformed version of the files – even though they don’t exist on your file system.

Wait, what?

Let me say that again as it’s jolly important. You link to files that don’t exist.

That’s just weird, right?

But Ben was switching from Parcel to Snowpack, and Parcel was weird too. In the Gulp days, we were super explicit about what files we were selecting, running tasks on, and where the transformed code went. In webpack, there are very explicit entry and output destinations, and it’s very focused on JavaScript being the input. But Parcel really wanted an HTML file to be the entry point and it would explore itself from there.

I always thought Parcel would have struck a nerve with the WordPress crowd harder, since you could point it at the template file where you link up your assets in a WordPress template and have it do its thing. I guess WordPress is too funky with all the wp_enqueue_style stuff and it just didn’t work?

Ben gives Snowpack a tentative thumbs up.

If you are starting a greenfield project I’d have zero qualms opting for Snowpack. It doesn’t have the depth of support documentation or stack overflow questions if you find yourself in the weeds, but generally speaking, it is solid enough to pick up and run with.

Me, next time I get a chance to play with build tools, I think my bar is going to be incredible speed. I’ve spent too much time on projects in my life where the developer experience is slow. I want smokin’ fast updates for whatever I’m working on.

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