Revamp of the dev server & builder

[617a7aa]

Discussed in #181

^{Originally posted by 0xAsteria September 26, 2021}
Yo!

I want to propose we switch from Webpack + wrangler dev to esbuild and Miniflare.

Why?

Speed, mostly. Flareact's dev server is painfully slow when using wrangler dev. I've managed to switch to using Miniflare and it's significantly faster, however still painfully slow to develop on due to Webpack being slow.

Switching to Miniflare over wrangler dev was relatively easy, instead of yarn dev pointing at flareact dev, it runs miniflare --watch which speeds it up a bunch and has more features by running it locally.

Switching to esbuild over Webpack is probably going to be a lot harder and I haven't managed to do it yet. esbuild is the only thing really holding Flareact back from perhaps becoming faster than Next.js in both production and development.

If we had 0.37s build times or less via esbuild instead of the 5-15s I have to wait for Webpack to fully rebuild everything, Flareact would be a beauty to develop on. The only thing holding it back right now (imo) is how slow DX is.

Not sure how we'd do it, but happy to help where I can. Have a think about it!

[tj-kev]

Hi,
I've been looking at miniflare recently as an alternative to the normal dev environment but not had a chance to try it out. Good to hear you managed to get it working.

I was thinking of providing both options. Would you be willing to do a pull request adding support for it?

For the esbuild, its not something I have used before. Looks like its still under active development but could be something we look at in the future?

[subhendukundu]

I have been using vitedge for a while. Love esbuild for sure.
But esbuild has few significant support issues on most of the popular open source packages?

[traffisco]

Definitely agree. Dev is painfully slow.

[shaunm]

EDIT: Solved

Running on Mac with Apple Silicon, one needs to call yarn run build and then miniflare after.

How were you able to get miniflare to work properly?

I face the following error:

$ miniflare --watch
node:fs:585
  handleErrorFromBinding(ctx);
  ^

Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/out/_flareact/static/build-manifest.json'