dimaspanduOverview
A bundler focused on correctness over aggressive optimization.
NGAPACK avoids aggressive build-time transformations. Instead, it focuses on preserving native ESM semantics, validating how code behaves in the browser, and making bundler internals inspectable.
The project serves as both a learning tool and a practical bundler for specific use cases.
The problem
Modern bundlers prioritize optimization over correctness.
Modern bundlers often prioritize optimization over correctness, making debugging difficult. Developers learning bundler internals have few readable, minimal implementations to study.
- Aggressive optimizations can break code that relies on ESM semantics.
- Bundler internals are opaque and hard to debug.
- Few minimal implementations exist for learning purposes.
Approach
Four-phase pipeline with namespace-based module isolation.
Built a four-phase pipeline: analyze (static module parsing), graph (dependency graph construction), emit (output generation), and runtime (browser helpers). Introduced namespace-based module isolation.
The approach prioritizes inspectability and correctness at every phase of the bundling process.
Solution
Separated analyzer from orchestrator with injected runtime helpers.
Separated analyzer (pure, side-effect free) from orchestrator (graph + emit). Injected browser-only runtime helpers for module registry, dynamic loading, and CSS module application. Namespaces prevent module identity collisions.
This separation makes each phase independently testable and the overall system easier to understand.
Implementation
Technical implementation.
Built with TypeScript using native ESM, the bundler performs static analysis without side effects and provides a readable end-to-end implementation.
Pipeline
Analyze, graph, emit, runtime phases with clear separation of concerns.
Isolation
Namespace-based module isolation preventing identity collisions.
Testing
Integration test suite executed in browser-like runtime.
Results
What changed.
The experimental bundler achieved its goals of correctness, determinism, and inspectability.
Links