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Do we need Live Reload (Watch) in bundlers? (marketplace.visualstudio.com)
submitted 7 months ago by trymeout@lemmy.world to c/webdev@programming.dev
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Do we need live reload feature in bunders? Couldn't we just use this extension for Visual Studio Code or simular features and extensions in other IDEs which will execute a custom command of your choice when you save a file with a certain file extension in your IDE?

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=emeraldwalk.RunOnSave

This extensions allows you to customize the commands to execute in saving a file in your global VSCode settings and in the VSCode workspace settings .vscode/settings.json, allowing others to use the same configuration in group projects.

Lightning CSS does not have a live reload feature and the live reload feature in Rollup cannot handle watching many files, however using this extension in VSCode, will not watch files but run the npm run dev:css or npm run dev:js command when saving a css or js file without watching for files to change.

One downside I see with this is when working on a project with others who are using different IDEs that do not support this feature. Besides that, is there any downsides to this approach?

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[-] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 1 points 7 months ago

Depends entirely on the bundler. They all have a watch mode, not all of them do hot reload. Hot reload is cool but full of gotchas, it's a hack but worst case you reload the page anyway. Some probably cache on disk, I think webpack can.

But if you think about it, you either want a clean build for production, or rebuild quickly during development. Watch mode does exactly what you'd do anyway, re-run a build. And IDEs can watch its output to give you error messages.

It's much easier to implement: just emit the code again when the file changes, and let it go through the pipeline. It's already there in memory all figured out, no need to figure a serialization format to put on disk to load back up.

But to circle back to the original question of why use watch mode when you can just rebuild it when saving a file: you're reinventing the wheel, and watch mode scales better and will always be faster. Yes, some people need watch mode.

[-] superb@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 7 months ago

I’m not a JS user, I was just surprised that bundlers were so bad

this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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