When comparing rollup vs stealjs, the Slant community recommends rollup for most people. In the question“What are the best frontend JavaScript module bundlers?” rollup is ranked 5th while stealjs is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose rollup is:
Can reduce resulting bundle size by performing "tree-shaking" (removing unused parts of code).
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Pros
Pro Implements tree-shaking
Can reduce resulting bundle size by performing "tree-shaking" (removing unused parts of code).
Pro Easy configuration
Simple config files
Pro Small and fast installation
It's only one file.
Pro Ideal for shipping es2015/ES6 modules
Pro Supports several modules types
StealJS has support for AMD, CJS and ES6 module types.
Pro Support for LESS and CSS
StealJS can also load CSS and LESS files in addition to JavaScript modules.
Pro Mix ES6 AMD and CommonJS
StealJS supports using all three module types, even in the same file.
Pro ES6 module support
StealJs supports ES6 modules and their import
and export
methods without having to compile them to CommonJS require
.
Pro Support for ES6
StealJS supports transpiling of ES6 code to ES5
Pro Supports all systemjs based plugins
Pro Supports source maps for easier debugging
Source maps allow for easier debugging, because they allow you to find the problems within the origin files instead of the output file.
Pro Share the same modules client-side and server-side
Because StealJS allows you to use the same require()
function as node.js, you can easily share modules between the client-side and server-side.
Pro Tap into npm's huge module ecosystem
Using StelaJS opens you up to npm, that has over 80k modules of which a great amount work both client-side and server-side. And the list is growing rapidly.
Cons
Con Async/await support lack
Doesn't support async/await out of the box for the time being, and there is no available working plugin to fill the gap.
Con Changing the order of require statements causes unexpected behavior
Sometimes changing the order of the require
statements in a JavaScript file loaded with stealjs may cause unexpected problems or even breaking the code altogether.