{"id":29052,"date":"2023-06-14T12:35:08","date_gmt":"2023-06-14T11:35:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/?p=29052"},"modified":"2023-06-15T16:32:09","modified_gmt":"2023-06-15T15:32:09","slug":"ember-embroider-initiative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/ember-embroider-initiative\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Intercom is supporting the Embroider Initiative to update Ember"},"content":{"rendered":"

Intercom has been building with Ember<\/a> for over 9 years, and we have evolved and grown together during that time.<\/p>\n

We have about 150 engineers working on our main app, and we ship to production hundreds of times a week, so Ember\u2019s<\/a> opinionated and \u201cbatteries included\u201d nature works well for us<\/a>. We rely on Ember to enable our nearly 30 product development teams to quickly deliver high-quality solutions to our customers.<\/p>\n

Embroider<\/a> is Ember\u2019s next-generation build system \u2013 at its core it is a bridge that will allow Ember to use modern JS ecosystem build tools such as Vite or Turbopack. That lets the Ember community benefit from the collective skills of the whole JS community and focus its efforts on the core differentiating framework functionality.<\/p>\n

Adopting Embroider<\/h2>\n

One of the main practical reasons we are adopting Embroider is that our build speeds with the existing classic ember-cli build system are quite slow. For example, local build refresh times can average 15s, multiplied by the number of builds a day<\/a> across all of our engineers. That’s north of 2,400 hours our engineers spend every year waiting for their local dev environment to refresh! With Embroider we expect to shave that down to a 1s average, potentially saving us ~2,000 hours a year and unlocking the benefits of instant feedback.<\/p>\n

“We believe Embroider will ensure Ember remains an attractive option for new companies, and so our community can continue to thrive”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We have been working to adopt Embroider over the past two years. While we got our main app working with it earlier this year, Embroider is still in development, and unfortunately for a large app like ours it is not quite ready for production.<\/p>\n

Crucially, by enabling Ember to run on modern JS build tooling, we believe Embroider will ensure Ember remains an attractive option for new companies, and so our community can continue to thrive.<\/p>\n

The Embroider Initiative<\/h2>\n

That\u2019s why we are backing the Embroider Initiative<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Embroider has been in development for four years and has been worked on by a small group of contributors in their spare time. The initiative\u2019s aim is to pick up the momentum of Embroider\u2019s development, striving to make it the default build tool for Ember in the short term. A number of companies have come together to fund dedicated development time on the project for an engineering team, as well as creating resources to make it easier for others to contribute.<\/p>\n

It is being spearheaded by web engineering consultancy Mainmatter<\/a> in conjunction with the Ember community, and Intercom is just one of many sponsors already signed up. (Learn more about our involvement in this interview with Mainmatter’s Managing Director Marco Otte-Witte.)<\/p>\n