Misc Question: How does this compare to tsup? #18

jessekrubin · 2022-07-08T04:57:42Z

jessekrubin
Jul 8, 2022

Thanks!!!

Answered by privatenumber

They are similar bundlers, but I think the main differences are:

pkgroll is zero-config. It reads the entry-points declared in your package.json to determine how to bundle the package. tsup requires manual configuration.
pkgroll is a thin abstraction over Rollup (just smartly configures it). Similarly, tsup is a thin abstraction over esbuild. pkgroll also uses esbuild for transformations & minification as a Rollup plugin, but the bundling & tree-shaking is done by Rollup (which is known to output best/cleanest code). However, when tsup emits type declaration, it also uses Rollup which eliminates the speed gains from using esbuild.
IIRC because tsup uses esbuild, the ESM to CJS compi…

privatenumber · 2022-07-08T05:59:17Z

They are similar bundlers, but I think the main differences are:

pkgroll is zero-config. It reads the entry-points declared in your package.json to determine how to bundle the package. tsup requires manual configuration.
pkgroll is a thin abstraction over Rollup (just smartly configures it). Similarly, tsup is a thin abstraction over esbuild. pkgroll also uses esbuild for transformations & minification as a Rollup plugin, but the bundling & tree-shaking is done by Rollup (which is known to output best/cleanest code). However, when tsup emits type declaration, it also uses Rollup which eliminates the speed gains from using esbuild.
IIRC because tsup uses esbuild, the ESM to CJS compilation wasn't great compared to Rollups. As a package maintainer who wants to support both ESM and CJS exports, this was one of the biggest annoyances of using tsup (which compelled me to develop pkgroll).

1 reply

Thanks so much for your reply!