@sdirix Thank you for taking a look. I actually fell into a esbuild trap, that I didn't notice before. Using '.node': 'file' doesn't actually load the file - it just replaces the import with a file path (which is pretty useless, to be honest). Anyway, I performed some changes to the esbuild plugin and the .node files should be loaded correctly now.

For some reason, the call to rg seems to fail during the runtime (it finds the rg/rg.exe file, but the calls result in error code 1). I'll not entirely sure why. I'll take a look at at that during the week.

@msujew One question: would it be possible to switch to Vite? It includes esbuild and has some other benefits..

@nimo23 AFAIK Vite stopped using esbuild as part of their pipeline and completely switched to Rollup, see also their documentation. They say themselves that Vite is slower than esbuild for that reason.

I know that Vite has a few benefits (and is easier to deal with in general), but Theia adopters don't need to configure too much anyway, as the cli already does most of the heavy lifting. Do you have a specific use case in mind that is difficult to implement using esbuild?

AFAIK Vite stopped using esbuild as part of their pipeline and completely switched to Rollu

Ok, good to know.

Do you have a specific use case in mind that is difficult to implement using esbuild?

(1) Live Reload and Watch:

According to esbuild docs (see https://esbuild.github.io/api/#live-reload):

There is no esbuild API for live reloading directly. Instead, you can construct live reloading by combining watch mode (to automatically start a build when you edit and save a file) and serve mode (to serve the latest build, but block until it's done) plus a small bit of client-side JavaScript code that you add to your app only during development.

In Vite, we can simply call npm run dev to enable both Live Reload and Watch while developing:

// package.json
"scripts": {
    "dev": "vite",
    "build": "tsc -b && vite build",
    "preview": "vite preview"
},

It would be nice to include a script run task in package.json that also combines Live Reload and Watch with esbuild.

@nimo23 Unfortunately, it's not that easy. Webpack is already capable of doing hot reloading, but we're not making use of that either - mainly because we're serving the frontend from our own backend and not using a dev server for that. Whether we use Vite, webpack or esbuild doesn't matter for that - hot reloading is not really supported in Theia right now. I assume that a feature like that needs to be implemented into the backend/frontend of the app itself, and cannot be supplied by the bundler anyway.