3 ms·

Is it fast during development on large codebases? (e.g. by compiling incrementally)

• TheHydroImpulse 12y ago
  The slow part is fetching dependencies. The "compiling" isn't compiling in the traditional compiled-language sense, where that would most likely take a significant amount of time.
  • RoboTeddy 12y ago
    The tool might have to recursively parse each file into an AST to find the `require` statements, and potentially apply various transforms (e.g. coffeescript). On large frontend codebases, these tasks can take an annoyingly long time. Hence, some tools cache (e.g. see browserify vs. watchify).
    • ianstormtaylor 12y ago
      Yup, it will cache the files automatically and check mtime's so that only the changed files need to be reparsed for dependencies. It ends up being really fast to build once dependencies are installed.
      • RoboTeddy 12y ago
        Fantastic!