Anybody experimenting with splitting and native esm?

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Is anybody experimenting with splitting their elm app into individual apps for each page together with native esm to load pages?

I don’t understand the topic well, but I have read through some explanations of native esm. I am wondering if it’s not as appealing to elm developers because elm bundles are much smaller, so code splitting by page does not have much appeal?

I am curious about this topic to see if there is some deeper reason to start investing in using vite in a build toolchain (will native esm + elm eventually open up even faster watch modes?), as opposed to the other options.

I am most curious about toolchains that attempt to cut out npm altogher. I found two examples so far (using devd/modd, direct downloads of core tools, and elm-test-rs).

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I’m aware of it but can’t say I’m particularly interested most of the time when it comes to Elm. Elm is generally small/fast enough that I haven’t needed it yet, and with tools like elm-watch have made development in Elm super fast, and in some ways more enjoyable than what esm would provide.

Unfortunately for you, elm-watch wouldn’t cut out npm. For me I don’t mind because npm has primarily become a development tool-chain tool and not one for production code (except when truly needed).

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The only nagging annoyance about npm is updating node version regularly and propagating that. I wish more elm tools embraced building shell/CLI in rust or go and install scripts using asdf to cut node out of the picture.

If I understand, webpack dev builds a bundle in memory and delivers it to a js process in browser which replaced the last bundle loaded into memory. I will start reading about elm-watch and try to understand how it delivers it’s recompiled results to browser and triggers browser update (or if it relies on vite/esbuild to do that instead)

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I haven’t manually manage Node in nearly a decade. I used to use either nvm or n, then used Volta for a bit. Currently I use Nix.

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I’m around asdf currently. Regardless, if you aren’t using nix, you have to set up some convention (agree on one shell or support multiple shells and decide when you will invoke n/nvm/asdf when entering directory) for automatically installing new versions across team when you change the version. That’s fine if it the tool/vm is providing value like the elm compiler, but for node, it’s just providing some CLI helper libs or a library equivalent of wget, it feels like unnecessary noise in developer machine setup.

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