I tried searching and didn’t find much in the way of discussion on next gen build tooling, so I thought I would give it a go.
It’s common knowledge now that the newest gen of build tools that leverage projects like SWC and esbuild are changing expectations surrounding build times, dev tooling, and the like. From what I can gather on Discord channel, it looks like esbuild is already in the Redwood ecosystem as part of the core package, which makes sense because builds and dev updates appear to run pretty quick.
I’m hitting a pain point in testing though, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this regard. I know Jest was chosen for it’s ubiquity and the fact that it’s feature complete. In anything more that just the tutorial app I’m seeing really long test runs, even in watch mode without the “all” option. the idea of Red, Green, Refactor isn’t something I’m able to work with because of this - I can’t maintain focus and dev velocity and spend more time staring at the terminal than I would like. I’m sure I’m not the only one experiencing this.
I also gathered that some work has been done by the core team to assess possible usage of other build tools. For me, Vite has been amazing to use and bringing it into the Redwood ecosystem appears to be a good fit, but I think the greatest gain for me would be in adopting Vitest in place of Jest. I’ve seen significant speedups in the dev feedback loop which allows the TDD cycle mentioned above, but since Redwood is so “batteries included” I’m not sure how to go about switching between Jest and Vitest. The API’s between the tools are nearly identical, so porting over should me relatively simple, but I haven’t had a chance to do a deep dive and see exactly how Redwood encompasses the functionality from Jest.
I’d love to hear some opinions from others and even see a discussion form surrounding the issue. What experiences are other having? What thoughts do others have regarding switching over? Is anyone aware of technical limitations that would prevent a migration from occuring?
