[TSC]: 2026 roadmap

[evenstensberg]

CC @snitin315 reference post. Remember to add issues, sub-issues in core/devserver/cli

CC @evenstensberg gsoc work, maintainer work (design with openjsf etc)

CC @ovflowd (and peers) docs work

[alexander-akait]

The main points of our roadmap, not each of them has a separate issues, some are complex and require to improve more things:

• CSS modules - adding built-in CSS solution into webpack (95% done) - Native CSS support webpack#14893, as you can see many of them in TODO, ETA - end of February/March

• Universal target - Add target: "universal" webpack#6525 when you code will work in any environments - NodeJS, browser, deno, bun, etc (98% done), what need to be finished - wrapper to load commmonjs modules, adding own target: "universal" and more tests, note - universal target supported only ECMA modules output and your code should be written like you wrote it for any environments (example - const myFs = isNodeJs ? require("fs") : require("memory-fs-which-will work-in-browser"))

• Typescript built-in support - almost ready to implement: enhanced-resolve already supports tsconfig.json, we need to add wrapper to module.javascript.parse and parse typescript files using NodeJS API, improve resolver option to support ts/cts/mts extensions and also add extensionAlias to mapping ts files to js and versa vice, and tests.

• HTML modules - including support HTML generation to replace https://github.com/jantimon/html-webpack-plugin/, support HTML modules (import html from "file.html") and supports HTML entrypoints (these two are the same). GOOD for GSoC, we should start with HTML modules and entrypoints. Use a HTML file as an entry point? webpack#536

• ECMA modules - fixes and improvements. ESM Module Output webpack#17121

• Webpack everywhere - compile webpack to ensure we can compile own code to node and web targets (universal too when was implemented), less nodejs internals and no buffer, adding playground on site.

• Adding support for deno and bun - deno already work, need tests, bun not tested.

• Lazy-barrel - look at rspack solution

• webpack-dev-server, webpack-dev-middleware, webpack-hot-middleware - union webpack-dev-middleware and webpack-hot-middleware into one middleware, extract overlay from dev server and union overlay and websocket (and event source) logic with extracted code from webpack-hot-middleware and reuse it inside dev server. Plugin support for dev server (WIP) @bjohansebas is working on it.

• webpack-cli - Deprecate Some Packages webpack-cli#4619 - avoid extra packages by union them into code, refactor help, refactor subcommand logic.

• Documentation and Site - auto-generation of documentation - name, description, type and default value (do we need more? maybe when option was added, anything else?), here we should write a function inside webpack itself which takes our schemes and types and generate JSON, then site will generate markdown from these JSON. Also new site, but the auto-generation of documentation is the high priority and should be resolved as soon as possible, currently our documentation does not reflect all the options, which has a negative impact on developer experience.

• Avoid extra packages - union terser-webpack-plugin, css-minimizer-webpack-plugin, html-minimizer-webpack-plugin and json-minimizer-webpack-plugin into one minimizer-webpack-plugin, all these packages have almost identical code, they also support all popular minimizers out of the box, we just need merge these code into one. in future we can more tasks here.

• Multithreading API - we have https://github.com/webpack/thread-loader as an example, but we need to move this into core, it is a difficult task and requires discussion

• Other tasks

  • move loader-runner into core, we don't need an extra package here and also our logic around loader context is divided by two packages - webpack itself and loader-runner, let's improve this
  • Fewer TODOs in webpack code to prepare for the future of webpack@6,
  • Improve coverage of code,
  • Improve types coverages (less any/unknown/EXPECTED_ANY/EXPECTED_FUNCTION/EXPECTED_OBJECT/etc types)
  • Add more benchmarks to webpack (maybe merge with https://github.com/webpack/benchmark) + extra github actions to test it between different version like we have in https://github.com/webpack/benchmark)

[alexander-akait]

@evenstensberg @hai-x @xiaoxiaojx Anything we should add here? Feel free to edit.

[evenstensberg]

On my end:

• New designs we can distribute in our projects.
• Renewed community work, get more engagement around webpack through articles and outreach.
• Google Summer of Code - Mentor students and try to make them stay in organization after internship ends.
• Economy - Get new donators so we can manage the project sustainably.

[alexander-akait]

@evenstensberg

New designs we can distribute in our projects

What do you mean here?

Renewed community work, get more engagement around webpack through articles and outreach

We started to write block posts + future good documentation + new site, it will promote us very good

Google Summer of Code - Mentor students and try to make them stay in organization after internship ends.

Not sure it is a part of our roadmap because we already participating in ti every year

Economy - Get new donators so we can manage the project sustainably

Yes, we need to search new paths to get donations to spend them for other tasks and contributors

[evenstensberg]

1. We can use the designs we get from openjsf in our docs page etc.. There's banners and assets related to swag.
2. 👍🏾
3. Okay
4. 👍🏾

[evenstensberg]

webpack/webpack.js.org#7778

[alexander-akait]

@evenstensberg let's keep open, I want to have this here and in future include more things, it is just a big common issue