prcl

Parcel

I hate JavaScript bundlers.

Don't get me wrong, I love modularizing things, and I love having small files.

What I hate is when I hit ⌘S, ⌘Tab, ⌘R,* and I, a humble human, beat the super-cool, magical, file-system-watching bundler running on my 2.8 GHz processor. I get the old verson, and I have to wait several seconds before I can hit ⌘R and actually see my changes.

Parcel is a JavaScript bundler. But I never beat it. Why?

• It doesn't actually parse JavaScript.
• It works almost entirely by concatenation.

It has a few extra rules that let it be really fast:

• You can never name anything require.
• You can never use non-constant module names.
• You can never put a require('…') call in a string.

(You really shouldn't be doing any of that anyway.)

So don't stand around waiting for your super-cool, magical bundler to do its thing. Use Parcel while you're developing, and iterate to your heart's content. Use your super-cool, magical, really slow bundler for releases, when you don't care how long it takes to run.

How do I use it?

Glad you asked! Like this:

// index.js:
const itt = require('itt')
const math = require('./math')
console.log(itt.range(10).map(math.square).join(' '))
 
// math.js:
exports.square = x => x * x

> npm i -g prcl
> prcl index.js >parcel.js

Feel free to node parcel.js or <script src=parcel.js> at this juncture.

I want source maps!

Just pass the output filename as an argument instead of redirecting.

> prcl index.js parcel.js
> ls
... parcel.js parcel.js.map ...

I want watching!

There's an option for that.

> prcl -w index.js parcel.js
ready
generate parcel.js in 5.1463 ms
generate parcel.js in 5.113103 ms
generate parcel.js in 3.508507 ms
generate parcel.js in 4.588618 ms
generate parcel.js in 3.170847 ms
...

How fast is it?

> time browserify index.js >browserify.js
real    0m0.225s
user    0m0.197s
sys     0m0.031s
> time node fuse-box.js
real    0m0.373s
user    0m0.324s
sys     0m0.051s
> time prcl index.js >parcel.js
real    0m0.077s
user    0m0.059s
sys     0m0.017s
 
# on a larger project 
> time browserify src/api-download.js >browserify.js
real    0m2.385s
user    0m2.459s
sys     0m0.416s
> time prcl src/api-download.js >parcel.js
real    0m0.204s
user    0m0.187s
sys     0m0.083s
 
# want source maps? 
> time browserify -d src/api-download.js -o bundle.js
real    0m3.142s
user    0m3.060s
sys     0m0.483s
> time prcl src/api-download.js parcel.js
real    0m0.315s
user    0m0.281s
sys     0m0.100s

Do you hate vowels?

No. Someone took the package name already.

---

* Or wait for it to hot-swap, or whatever.