Investigate using Parcel.js

[isaacabraham]

It's been suggested that we could consider using Parcel.js as opposed to webpack. Something that I do find "challenging" with webpack is the number of plugins and learning it all. Does anyone know the differences / pros & cons? Anyone want to do a POC?

[Krzysztof-Cieslak]

Demo for Fable - https:/slogsdon/parcel-plugin-fable/tree/master/example

Main advantage - this line looks amazing for demos ;-):

https:/slogsdon/parcel-plugin-fable/blob/bc121c47c46c5e66b9b888d73e3e9847896f1dd3/example/src/index.html#L13

[Krzysztof-Cieslak]

The potential problem is that proxing API calls is not built-in and requires some config - parcel-bundler/parcel#55

[isaacabraham]

And it's not possible to achieve HMR etc. without using something like webpack dev server i.e. could we have the "watcher" process (whatever it is) monitor a static JS file that is hosted by Saturn (similar to how dotnet watch works)?

Personally if we could remove the need for two web servers, I would be very happy - it can be quite confusing for beginners.

[isaacabraham]

Along the same lines, we have things like #98 where we have build steps for yarn that (maybe?) aren't needed because they're either done in FAKE or by webpack.

[theimowski]

Closing for now - after having a discussion on the topic we arrived at a conclusion we want to have a single option for bundling, and currently we don't know if we could provide an alternative for webpack dev-server which is quite crucial.