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Do we need Live Reload (Watch) in bundlers?
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Depends entirely on the bundler. They all have a watch mode, not all of them do hot reload. Hot reload is cool but full of gotchas, it's a hack but worst case you reload the page anyway. Some probably cache on disk, I think webpack can.
But if you think about it, you either want a clean build for production, or rebuild quickly during development. Watch mode does exactly what you'd do anyway, re-run a build. And IDEs can watch its output to give you error messages.
It's much easier to implement: just emit the code again when the file changes, and let it go through the pipeline. It's already there in memory all figured out, no need to figure a serialization format to put on disk to load back up.
But to circle back to the original question of why use watch mode when you can just rebuild it when saving a file: you're reinventing the wheel, and watch mode scales better and will always be faster. Yes, some people need watch mode.
I’m not a JS user, I was just surprised that bundlers were so bad