Remove webpack bootstrap for single-module apps

There’s a couple of entry points within my application which either a) don’t rely on any other modules or b) only rely on external modules.

I’d ideally like to remove the ‘webpack bootstrap’ for these entry points, since AFAIK it doesn’t add any value, but does add marginal runtime overhead.

I made the following change to MainTemplate which seems to work. It omits the module boilerplate when there’s only a single module, but is quite hacky (mostly around the coupling to require): https://github.com/webpack/webpack/compare/master...ljwagerfield:single-module-template

Are there any better ways of disabling the ‘module loading’ boilerplate?

[sokra]

We considering it

[sokra]

webpack 5 alpha 31 supports this.

Here is an example: https://github.com/webpack/webpack/tree/f25906fd2fd0bbcf472d9d44dcd8d6a92e3fbe95/examples/module

The following conditions must be met:

• single EcmaScript module, or all modules concatenated
• no other runtime helper needed
• output.module: true (otherwise it would be wrapped in an IIFE)