Hacking Node Module Hooks for Blazing Fast Frontend Dev
2025-05-07
To speed up frontend development, the author created a series of orthogonal Node module hooks. One module loader transforms JSX to JS, another remaps imports, another searches for .{ts,tsx,jsx} files when .js isn't found, and a final one works with FileTree, using query string cache busting to load the latest version of files. FileTree's update events trigger frontend rebuilds, with module versioning ensuring that modules are only re-executed if their dependencies change, preserving runtime state and avoiding restarting the entire process.
Development
Module Hooks