esbuild
An extremely fast JavaScript bundler.
esbuild is a JavaScript and TypeScript bundler written in Go that is roughly an order of magnitude faster than Webpack and Rollup for typical bundling workloads. It compiles, minifies, tree-shakes, and bundles in parallel using all available CPU cores, which is what gives it the speed advantage.
Evan Wallace (formerly of Figma) started esbuild in 2020 and has remained the primary maintainer. The codebase is fairly small (around 90,000 lines of Go) and the API surface is kept intentionally minimal — esbuild does the bundling step quickly and leaves higher-level concerns to wrappers.
esbuild is now the underlying bundler in many newer toolchains: Vite uses it for development server module transformation, tsup uses it for npm package authoring, and Snowpack/Bun/Deno all draw on it directly or as inspiration. Direct use is also common in Go-based development environments and in build pipelines that previously used Webpack.
Install
npm install --save-dev esbuild
Authors
- Evan Wallace (creator)