This is the way. Trivial to get live reloading working. HMR is overrated. I went with esbuild in my last project, and have no regrets. Also, used my own 100-line end-to-end typed RPC layer with Zod validation doing the heavy lifting. No codegen required for any part of the project other than generating types from Postgres. No regrets there, either. The only thing I would have changed in that project is I would have used Kysely instead of just raw porsager.

But, it doesn’t need to be so. Go is pretty fast to compile. So is Jai, from what I’ve seen. So was TurboPascal. Rust has a similar problem to the one Vite has been solving- Rust (and most languages) weren’t designed for compilation speed, and it’s hard to retroactively fix that. But, there’s no reason we shouldn’t have a bunch of statically typed, fast-to-compile languages.

Next is the Microsoft Sharepoint of the JavaScript world. It’s a terrible solution to just about anything, and yet gets crammed into places and forced on people due to marketing-led decision making.

It depends on your application, but for typical SPAs, there are any number of approaches which are better than next by every metric I (personally) care about.

It blows my mind that there is a 12m build for a JavaScript application. How may lines of code is this app?