Dependency Cleanup

[avivkeller]

Reduce Webpack’s dependency footprint to improve install time, bundle size, and security surface.

Details:

• Remove unused or redundant dependencies.
• Replace heavy libraries with lightweight alternatives:
  • Jest to node:test
  • Tapable to node:events
  • glob-to-regexp to node:fs
  • loader-runner to node:module?

Difficulty: Medium

[alexander-akait]

We can't replace:

Jest to node:test

We can't right now due we still support Node.js@10, also basic asserts is very hard to read and require a lot of effects, so we should evaluate it for webpack@6

Tapable to node:events

Tapable is a core of webpack, very optimized and very fast, faster then node:events, less memory usage and have a lot of features like stage and etc

glob-to-regexp to node:fs

We can introduce fs.glob for watchpack, in other places, I don't this it will be easy, but yes, there are rooms to improvements

loader-runner to node:module

Loader-runner and node:module are fully different things, not sure what and how we should replace