Saturday, October 22, 2016

Webpack vs SystemJS

Angular 2.0 finally released on September 15th. We started a new project in early October, so we decided to try it out. Pretty quickly the question came up, which module loader should we use for the new application?

The Angular 2.0 tutorials use SystemJS, except for a few pages referencing Webpack. So we started leaning towards SystemJS. Then I came across a webpack article in the Angular documentation: In it is says:

It's an excellent alternative to the SystemJS approach we use throughout the documentation

Well, if it is such an "excellent alternative" why wasn't it used in the documentation instead of SystemJS itself?

I also found this on Stack overflow.

Webpack is a flexible module bundler. This means that it goes further [edit: than SystemJS] and doesn't only handle modules but also provides a way to package your application (concat files, uglify files, ...). It also provides a dev server with load reload for development.
SystemJS and Webpack are different but with SystemJS, you still have work to do (with Gulp or SystemJS builder for example) to package your Angular2 application for production.

So Webpack can do more, point for Webpack.

And then I found this article

Angular 2 CLI moves from SystemJS to Webpack

Google itself is now using webpack? Game over, webpack wins.

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