What is core?

This is an obsolete shared library that once powered parts of webpack, a popular JavaScript bundling tool. The README warns upfront that it's no longer used, webpack 2 and later versions moved away from this code, so it's mainly of historical interest now. Back when it was active, webpack-core served as a foundation that multiple webpack-related tools could build on top of. Think of it like a shared toolkit: instead of webpack and a companion tool called enhanced-require each writing their own code to handle the same tasks, they both used this common core. The core handled two main technical areas: managing "loaders" (which are plugins that tell webpack how to process different file types like CSS or images) and source maps (which let developers see their original code when debugging, even though the browser is running a bundled version). The README notes it was never designed to be used on its own, it was always meant as internal infrastructure for other projects. Because webpack evolved and became more complex, the maintainers eventually decided to redesign how these pieces fit together, making this shared core unnecessary. For someone exploring webpack's history or old codebases built on early versions of webpack, this repo shows how the project was structured years ago. But for anyone starting a new project today, there's no reason to use it.