Bundlers support for Scala.js

[romanowski]

from @alexarchambault

It'd be nice to offer some kind of support for bundling Scala.JS projects with snowpack.

In particular, it'd be nice to have the scenario described in this post to work fine with Scala CLI.

Generally, it'd be nice to offer features similar to scalajs-bundler, offering to:

• add NPM dependencies
• tests in jsdom?
• bundle Scala.JS via webpack

We are not really sure what the overall UX / options should be

[armanbilge]

Snowpack is now dead and Vite is favored over Webpack for Scala.js tutorials. Other contenders include esbuild and Turbopack (branded as a Webpack successor).

But, I'd like to point out an alternative to keeping-up-with-the-JavaScript-bundlers:

With ES Modules, which are now natively supported in all browsers, browsers can load a dependency directly from a CDN so it doesn't need to be bundled in the application JS.

The trick is that you probably don't want to hardcode a CDN URL in your @JSImports in some library. So we need some sort of link-time "import map", which enables the user to remap these standard import statements (referring to the NPM packages) to import statements that point to their preferred CDN instead.

Further reading:

• Ability to remap @JSImports at linking time scala-js/scala-js#4837

[Gedochao]

This hasn't been selected for the current roadmap.
If you'd like Scala CLI team to work on this, feel free to upvote/thumbs-up this issue.
If anyone is interested in working on this themselves, feel free to reach out to us here or on discord.

[armanbilge]

To be clear: I don't want to encourage anyone to work on this issue. As I mentioned, JS bundlers come and go like the wind. Instead, I encourage to focus on using technologies that are natively supported by browsers and other runtimes.