Add initial benchmark to compare against babel-loader based approach

[bebraw]

It would be cool to see the impact against babel-loader. I wonder if there's some open source project that could be used for figuring out the performance difference. Also pros/cons would be good to understand. At least we would lose any Babel plugins with esbuild but that's not a big deal for some projects.

[Nickhoyer]

The improvement in my project has been around 45 sec build time -> 6 sec build time in github actions, going from babel-loader to esbuild-loader

[bebraw]

@Nickhoyer That's impressive!

[privatenumber]

I took minification benchmarks here:
https://github.com/privatenumber/minification-benchmarks

In a proprietary codebase I have access to, it reduces build-time by 2~3min (7m → 4m) by replacing babel-loader and Terser with esbuild.

If you know of any large public codebases that transpiles using babel-loader and has a pretty minimal Webpack config, let me know and I can test there. I tried it on vue-hackernews-2.0 but the codebase is too small and was seeing only about a 1s difference (7s → 6s).

---

We can also make an issue/PR to add a esbuild option to Vue CLI that uses this.

[josteph]

Sharing my result on one of my CRA based, medium sized project.

Before

After

Tested on:
CPU 2,3 GHz Intel Core i5
RAM 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3

Though it could benefit more in a slower machine.

[khasky]

Not related to babel, but my results for medium-sized project with bundle size of 6MB are:

• Parcel 1.x ~ 50-70s
• Webpack + esbuild-loader ~ 13s

[przemuh]

In my case:

babel-loader + thread-loader - 87s
esbuild-loader - 42s

[fkhadra]

In my case, bundle size of 15MB(yes huge...). CRA ejected config

• babel: ~190 sec (cold start no cache), 90 sec with the cache
• esbuild-loader: ~55 sec

[s-kris]

My nextjs project's build time went from 150s to 70s