Patch Changes

• Fix stray semicolon emitted before an imported call following a parenthesized sequence element. (by @alexander-akait in #21533)

• Make require(esm) module.exports re-export analysis independent of module processing order. (by @alexander-akait in #21521)

• Ignore ERR_SERVER_NOT_RUNNING on lazy-compilation backend dispose so compiler.close() succeeds on Bun. (by @alexander-akait in #21521)

• Name the failing key when DefinePlugin fails to evaluate a typeof value. (by @alexander-akait in #21503)

• Improve Deno compatibility: guard setNoDelay and force-close connections on lazy-compilation backend dispose, and return a real ArrayBuffer from the Node async/sync wasm loader so WebAssembly.instantiate accepts it. (by @alexander-akait in #21524)

• Speed up the HTML parser and cut its peak memory: module-scope helpers/state and tokenizer callbacks, plus exact AST column pre-sizing. (by @alexander-akait in #21492)

• Track CommonJS build dependencies by parsing sources when require.cache children are unavailable (e.g. Bun). (by @alexander-akait in #21531)

• Cook common string-literal escapes on the JS parser fast path and own the tokenizer's cold-path readers. (by @alexander-akait in #21500)

• Build the CSS parseA* AST on the SoA store instead of node classes, cutting parse memory and time. (by @alexander-akait in #21498)

• Speed up and cut memory of the experimental CSS and HTML parsers: drop two derivable AST node columns, and scan long string, url, comment, and plaintext token bodies natively. (by @alexander-akait in #21504)

• Speed up non-modules CSS parsing: skip redundant token re-reads, drop selector-prelude tokens without materializing nodes, allocate rule preludes lazily, and fast-path empty list seals. (by @alexander-akait in #21511)

• Speed up stats generation and cut its peak memory: reuse cached sort comparators instead of thrashing the comparator caches on every sort, and drop redundant module-graph lookups and allocations in the extractors. (by @alexander-akait in #21506)

• Speed up CSS parsing: byte-range function-name checks, indexed sibling lookahead. (by @bjohansebas in #21520)

• Reduce allocations and redundant work across the code-generation, module-concatenation, exports/usage-analysis, hashing, and chunk-splitting hot paths. (by @alexander-akait in #21516)

• Enable the Node.js compile cache in the webpack CLI entry point. (by @bjohansebas in #21523)

• Encode the persistent cache with V8's value serializer. (by @avivkeller in #21514)

• Speed up SplitChunksPlugin: reject non-subset chunk sets with 64-bit signatures, cache unnamed entry keys, and drop per-module closures. (by @avivkeller in #21529)

• Initialize NormalModule._ast in the constructor so each instance keeps a single hidden-class shape. (by @alexander-akait in #21515)

• Reduce allocations in the binary serialization hot paths. (by @alexander-akait in #21526)

• Deduplicate and simplify several lib modules and speed up AggressiveMergingPlugin. (by @alexander-akait in #21525)

• Rename nested const/let __webpack_require__ and __webpack_exports__ declarations in bundled webpack output. (by @hai-x in #21508)