⚡Breaking news!

Webpack 5 is released!

webpack 4 was released in February 2018. Since then we shipped a lot of features without breaking changes. We know that people dislike major changes with breaking changes. Especially with webpack, which people usually only touch twice a year, and the remaining time it "just works". But shipping features without breaking changes also has a cost: We can't do major API or architectural improvements.

So from time to time, there is a point where the difficulties pile up and we are forced to do breaking changes to not mess everything up. That's the time for a new major version. So webpack 5 contains these architectural improvements and the features that where not possible to implement without them.

The major version was also the chance to revise some of the defaults and to align with proposals and specifications that come up in the meantime.

So today (2020-10-10) webpack 5.0.0 is released, but this doesn't mean it's done, bugfree or even feature-complete. As with webpack 4 we continue development by fixing problems and adding features. In the next days there will probably a lot bugfixes. Features will come later.

This release focus on the following:
- Improve build performance with Persistent Caching.
- Improve Long Term Caching with better algorithms and defaults.
- Improve bundle size with better Tree Shaking and Code Generation.
- Improve compatibility with the web platform.
- Clean up internal structures that were left in a weird state while implementing features in v4 without introducing any breaking changes.
- Prepare for future features by introducing breaking changes now, allowing us to stay on v5 for as long as possible.

https://webpack.js.org/blog/2020-10-10-webpack-5-release/

However, webpack@5 raised a lot of discussions because of its breaking changes.
See this article (from Sindre Sorhus) for example: https://blog.sindresorhus.com/webpack-5-headache-b6ac24973bf1