Glossary
The vocabulary used throughout the Guchho documentation.
#Terms are defined as Guchho uses them; where a word is overloaded in the wider ecosystem, the definition here is the one the reference relies on.
Asset - a file the build copies to the output rather than compiles: images, fonts, and anything without a loader that transforms it.
Bundle - to follow every import from the entry points and emit the result as one or a few files. Off by default; an HTML entry point switches it on when it was not specified either way.
Code splitting - emitting shared or lazily-reached modules as separate
chunks rather than inlining everything into one file. Controlled by splitting.
Define - a build-time substitution of an identifier for literal text, such
as process.env.NODE_ENV for "production". See
inject configuration.
Entry point - a file the build starts from. Everything reachable from an entry point is part of the build; everything else is not.
External - a package left as an import in the output instead of being bundled in. Used for libraries and for anything the consumer provides.
Format - the module convention of the output: iife, cjs, esm, umd,
amd or system.
Loader - the compiler used for a file type. A loader turns bytes of a given extension into JavaScript (or CSS, into the stylesheet graph).
Mangle - to rename identifiers or property names to shorter ones. Identifier mangling is part of minification; property mangling is opt-in and scoped by pattern.
Metafile - a JSON description of a build: its outputs, the inputs behind each, and their sizes. Used for size analysis.
Minify - to reduce output size by whitespace removal, syntax rewriting and identifier renaming.
Output file - a file the build produces, in memory or on disk, depending on
whether write was requested.
Platform - the runtime whose conventions the output follows: browser,
node or neutral.
Plugin - a named unit of build customisation. See the plugin documentation.
Source map - a file that maps generated output back to original sources so a debugger can show the code you wrote.
Target - the language version or engines the output must run on, such as
es2020 or chrome80.
Transform - a single-file compile with no graph: one input, one output. See the transform recipe.
Tree shaking - removing exports that no reachable code uses. Off by default;
enabled with treeShaking.
Watch - rebuilding automatically when a file the build read changes.