ts-loader v9.6.0 now supports both webpack 4 and webpack 5, reversing the decision made in 2021 to drop webpack 4 support. The motivation is that webpack 4 still sees around 4 million downloads per week and ts-loader@8 nearly 1 million, making a separate maintenance branch increasingly burdensome. The changes required were relatively minor — handling API differences between webpack 4 and 5, adding loader-utils as an optional peer dependency, and extending the test suite to cover both versions. GitHub Copilot assisted in implementing the changes. The goal is to consolidate maintenance into a single branch, simplifying future TypeScript compatibility patches.
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Why support webpack 4 again? Let the experiment begin! ts-loader@9.6.0 supports webpack 4 21.9K Impressions