Snowpack is a modern, lightweight toolchain for web application development. Traditional dev bundlers like webpack or Parcel need to rebuild & rebundle entire chunks of your application every time you save a single file. This introduces lag between changing a file and seeing those changes reflected in the browser, sometimes as slow as several seconds.

Snowpack solves this problem by serving your application unbundled in development. Any time you change a file, Snowpack never rebuilds more than a single file. There’s no bundling to speak of, just a few milliseconds of single-file rebuilding and then an instant update in the browser via HMR. We call this new approach O(1) Build Tooling. You can read more about it in our Snowpack 2.0 Release Post.

When you’re ready to deploy your web application to users, you can add back a traditional bundler like Webpack or Parcel. With Snowpack you get bundled & optimized production performance without sacrificing dev speed by adding an unnecessary bundler,