Replace webpack-dev-server

Hello! So i’m the co-author of webpack-plugin-serve which was created with the idea to be more simple dev-server as possible, including speed (including increase in HMR speed), install size, stability and few other fancy features like error overlays, progress overlays, etc, and it is also built on top of Koa, the same server that webpack-serve was using, which is extremely fast in comparison to express.

Before releasing this we did some have testing on huge codebases and monorepos and the increase in performance was significantly, which i think will be such a really good improvement for docz.

But this comes with a caveat. Webpack had several improvements when changed to node 10 due to some improvements on v8 compared to node 8 or 9. We also choose node 10 on the improvements that node had brought to the way that websockets are handled (increase in performance), and, of course, for being LTS now.

I understand that moving the support from node 8 to node 10 can be extremely hard for a huge userbase as docz has, but i would like to propose and recieve feedback from the community on how this would be accepted and how the transition could be done.

Also, what do you guys think about following the lts lifecycle and keeping docz evergreen? (latest lts)

Thank you all!

[kentcdodds]

If it’s decided to go this direction, what if docz used both for a while? So users using node 10 could benefit from all the improvements, but people stuck on Node 8 (or even 6) could still get updates from docz.

I think it’d be great to keep supporting at least Node 8 for another 6 months or year.

[matheus1lva]

@transitive-bullshit https://github.com/shellscape/webpack-plugin-serve/tree/feat/benchmark/benchmark

This is a benchmark folder that i created to be able to test the 3 most “important” development servers available right now. Initially it requires a manual run to see the results from speed-measure-webpack-plugin, but i’ll work on an automated way to have 1 command generating a readable output. As we can see the improvements were good even on a small test like that, it can scale better on projects with a big amount of modules.

HMR can be measure too, but i’m struggling to find a way to measure it from external tools, other than looking at it.

I’m happy to help during the transition and with whatever is needed to improve the performance of docz!