evanw/esbuild v0.8.44

on GitHub

Create a logo for esbuild (#61)

This release introduces a logo for esbuild:

Inspirations for the logo include:

• The fast-forward symbol because esbuild is extremely fast and because one of esbuild's goals is to accelerate the evolution of the whole web tooling ecosystem.

• The right-shift symbol because esbuild's production optimizations make your code smaller and because esbuild itself contains many low-level optimizations for speed.

Having a logo for esbuild should make it easier to include esbuild in lists of other tools since the other tools often all have logos.

Add support for node's --preserve-symlinks flag (#781)

This release adds the --preserve-symlinks flag which behaves like the corresponding flag in node. Without the flag, esbuild and node will use the real path (after resolving symlinks) as the identity of a file. This means that a given file can only be instantiated once. With the flag, esbuild and node will use the original path (without resolving symlinks) as the identity of a file. This means that a given file can be instantiated multiple times, once for every symlink pointing to it. Each copy will have its own identity so the resulting bundle may contain duplicate files. This option is useful if your code relies on this flag in node (or the resolve.symlinks setting in Webpack).

Ignore a leading byte order mark (BOM) in CSS files (#776)

Some text editors insert a U+FEFF code point at the start of text files. This is a zero-width non-breaking space character. Using one at the start of a file is a convention which is meant to indicate that the contents of the file are UTF-8 encoded. When this is done, the character is called a byte order mark.

Unlike JavaScript, CSS does not treat U+FEFF as whitespace. It is treated as an identifier instead. This was causing esbuild to misinterpret files starting with a BOM as starting with an extra identifier, which could then cause the initial CSS rule in the file to be parsed incorrectly.

Now esbuild will skip over a BOM if it's present before beginning to parse CSS. This should prevent issues when working with these files.

Add message notes to the API

The internal logging system has the ability to attach additional notes to messages to provide more information. These show up as additional log messages in the terminal when using the command-line interface. Here is an example of a note:

 > src/structs/RTree.js: warning: Duplicate key "compareMinX" in object literal
    469 │     compareMinX: function (a, b)
        ╵     ~~~~~~~~~~~
   src/structs/RTree.js: note: The original "compareMinX" is here
    206 │     compareMinX: compareNodeMinX,
        ╵     ~~~~~~~~~~~

With this release, notes are also supported in the JS and Go APIs. This means you can now generate your own notes using plugins as well as inspect the notes generated by esbuild.

Add origin information to errors from plugins (#780)

Errors thrown during JavaScript plugin callback evaluation will now be annoated to show where that plugin callback was registered. That looks like this:

 > example-plugin.js: error: [example-plugin] foo.bar is not a function
    15 │         foo.bar();
       ╵             ^
    at ./example-plugin.js:15:13
    at ./node_modules/esbuild/lib/main.js:750:34

   example-plugin.js: note: This error came from the "onLoad" callback registered here
    13 │       build.onLoad({ filter: /.*/ }, args => {
       ╵             ~~~~~~
    at setup (./example-plugin.js:13:13)
    at handlePlugins (./node_modules/esbuild/lib/main.js:668:7)

This should make it easier to debug crashes in plugin code.

Fix a regression with the synchronous JavaScript API (#784)

In version 0.8.39, a change was made to avoid dangling esbuild processes when node exits abnormally. The change introduced a periodic ping between the child esbuild process and its host process. If the ping doesn't go through, the child process is able to detect that the host process is no longer there. Then it knows to exit since it's no longer being used.

This caused a problem with the synchronous JavaScript API calls which run the esbuild child process in a single-response mode. The ping message was interpreted as a second response and tripped up the message protocol. Pings are only useful for the asynchronous API calls. Running the pings during synchronous API calls was unintentional. With this release pings are no longer run for synchronous API calls so this regression should be fixed.

Remove absolute paths for disabled files from source maps (#785)

Files can be ignored (i.e. set to empty) using the browser field in package.json. Specifically, you can set the browser field to a map where the key is the module name and the value is false. This is a convention followed by several bundlers including esbuild.

Previously ignoring a file caused that file's path to appear as an absolute path in any generated source map. This is problematic because it means different source maps will be generated on different systems, since the absolute path contains system-specific directory information. Now esbuild will treat these paths the same way it treats other paths and will put a relative path in the source map.