Disclaimer: I work at Google, though not on this, and I very much want to see WebBundles succeed to solve many problems with asset distribution right now and reduce the gymnastics that bundlers have to go through.
So, this is a super unfortunate analysis that seems to be founded on a major logical inconsistently.
The post claims that:
1) It's costly to vary URLs per-user without WebBundlers because it harms caching. By caching I presume here they mean edge caching.
2) It's cheap to vary URLs per-user with WebBundles.
The costs are not any different:
* If you vary the bundle per-user then you also harm edge caching.
* If you build a bundle per-deployment, like current bundlers do, then you're not varying URLs per-user
* If you build bundles on the fly per request, say in an edge worker, then you could also just as easily and cheaply vary URLs per user the same way, with the same or less impact on caching.
The whole thing just doesn't make sense, and undermines one of the most important proposals for fixing not only resource loading but also much of the tooling ecosystem.
So, this is a super unfortunate analysis that seems to be founded on a major logical inconsistently.
The post claims that:
1) It's costly to vary URLs per-user without WebBundlers because it harms caching. By caching I presume here they mean edge caching.
2) It's cheap to vary URLs per-user with WebBundles.
The costs are not any different:
* If you vary the bundle per-user then you also harm edge caching.
* If you build a bundle per-deployment, like current bundlers do, then you're not varying URLs per-user
* If you build bundles on the fly per request, say in an edge worker, then you could also just as easily and cheaply vary URLs per user the same way, with the same or less impact on caching.
The whole thing just doesn't make sense, and undermines one of the most important proposals for fixing not only resource loading but also much of the tooling ecosystem.