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esbuild is an extremely fast JavaScript and CSS bundler and minifier written in Go. It focuses on speed through parallelism and native compilation, enabling rapid development builds and efficient production bundles. It supports ES modules, tree shaking, code splitting and sourcemaps, and integrates with common toolchains via CLI or programmatic API.
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esbuild is an extremely fast JavaScript and CSS bundler with a built-in minifier that turns source files into efficient production bundles and can generate sourcemaps.
The project was motivated by the claim that current web build tools are 10–100x slower than they could be. Evan Wallace created esbuild to bring faster, easier-to-use build tooling, implemented in Go to achieve speed through parallelism and native execution.
Think of esbuild as a deterministic “build assembler”: it starts from your entry points, creates a dependency graph, resolves modules (including ESM/CommonJS), and applies transformations such as tree shaking, minification, code splitting, and sourcemap generation. It then emits the resulting JavaScript and CSS artifacts to your configured output locations. The same pipeline can be driven via the CLI or a programmatic API, and extended with plugins.
A fixed sequence turns inputs into graph construction, transformations, and output files.
Modules and their relationships are resolved and consolidated into bundle artifacts.
Tree shaking, minification, and code splitting reduce bundle size and improve runtime efficiency.
Additional mapping data ties bundled code back to original sources for debugging.
The engine is usable via CLI or API and can be extended through plugins.
Choose esbuild when you want very fast bundling for web assets and prefer straightforward integration into existing build toolchains. It’s especially useful when you need a single build run that combines ESM/CommonJS support with tree shaking, minification, code splitting, and sourcemaps. The main practical limit is scope: esbuild targets bundling/minifying very directly, so other pipeline concerns (testing, orchestration of non-bundling steps) still belong in your broader build environment.
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