I mean, sure, that’s probably heavily influenced by the need for bundling for the frontend.
But it isn’t done blindly. Bundlers reduce the overall size of the code, either due to minification or tree-shaking (removing unused modules). It also removes the filesystem overhead of resolving and opening other modules.
Would bundling be useful in other interpreted languages?
I suppose you may count JVM’s compilation to bytecode as being very similar.
I guess it boils down to if bundling can improve execution speed. On the web it would make page loads quicker.
In nodejs, at least, it does. The minification and tree-shaking can make code significantly smaller. This can mean smaller cold start time in AWS Lambda for example, or just overall a little less RAM. If your heap isn’t that large, that can be noticeable.
It also eliminates the filesystem overhead of resolving and loading modules.
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it can increase execution speed because the alternative is usually hosting a file separately and making a separate http request to get that file. Bundling allows you to deliver one bigger file instead of multiple small files, saving on network requests.
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tree-shaking, minifcation, g-zipping - to get the best performance you want all of your code and only your code. also gzip(filepart1 + filepart2) < gzip(filepart1) + gzip(filepart2) + …
But I think the biggest factor is
- In JS it’s very common that you don’t have control over where your code is built or executed. With bundling you can usually specify a build target so you can write your code in modern JS with the guarantee that the output will be usable on older systems.
Most of the time if your code doesn’t work because of an old environment the end user will just update their environment but with most JS being written for the web it was beneficial if not required that you put in the effort to make your code run on older environments because your target user base might not have the permissions or technical abilities to upgrade the “environment” (aka browser).
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