Webpack 4.0
webpack team, great work on this! The new `sideEffects` option is the big one we've been waiting for – lots of bundles are going to be much smaller.<p>People like to gripe about webpack and JS bundlers in general. At my last company, before webpack and browserify had really caught on (and before a bunch of other bundlers even existed), I crafted us a custom JS build solution using Make. It had just the right amount of smarts (but was mostly a dumb concatenator and wrapper), and was extremely fast and simple. Basically, it was a cranky old HN poster's wet dream.<p>And you know what? It still fucking sucked. We had to vendor most of our dependencies and then manually edit their source code to modify references, because Make doesn't understand JS dependencies or module resolution. We couldn't expose or even check for globals like `require` or `define` because we were third-party JS living on other people's sites with their own JS, and any accidental intermingling could break their shit, or our shit.<p>webpack solves all of that. It is absolutely necessary and anyone who says otherwise doesn't understand the problem space. So cheers on another release!