However, looking at it from another angle, Webpack still maintains relatively active development on GitHub and hasn't officially entered "maintenance mode." The recent release of Babel 8 Beta also reminded me that these veteran infrastructure tools in the JS ecosystem are still capable of self-renewal and seeking breakthroughs.
I'd love to hear your thoughts:
1. Do you think Webpack will actually release a version 6.x? Or will they just continue evolving on 5.x for the long haul?
2. If they do release it, what major changes do you expect? Will they introduce Rust into the core?
3. Could the release of a 6.x version potentially restore Webpack as the "first choice" for new projects?
davydm•1mo ago
Webpack honestly needs official, guided tooling configurators. Documentation often mentions a block of code, but not exactly _where_ to put it. AI agents are apparently stumped by a 4-5 upgrade, documentation lets me down, no automated upgrade tooling, and a lot of the changes I've seen are just cheese movement - add nothing useful, but require upgrade maintenance.
If webpack wants to take the top spot again, they need to work on: - performance: this is the most obvious issue right now. Webpack builds aren't exactly fast, and the new breed of tooling, esp vite, blows webpack away - consistent api: stop moving cheese arbitrarily, or, if you have to change things, provide backwards compatibility shims or upgrade tooling - improvements to documentation: it should be so hard to figure out where suggested config blocks of code should go - providing real examples would help
narukeu•1mo ago