Switch to a newer build system?

[jimmywarting]

It was very long time ago since i saw gulp being used for it's build system.
specially so when using the very old concatinate build strategy.

what would you say about trying to switch it out for something a bit more modern like using esbuild and ESM syntax?
that way you would have better type interference.

doe it would require a very hectic transformation to go from one thing to the other, maybe come up with some plan to do so?

[mathiasrw]

Concatenating strings is an old art that never should have existed.

We can put everything into one big file and swap to esbuild (yep - the right tool) - but that would make it painful to edit - so we want to keep modules with functionality. Happy to see some progress here. I think I started 3 times over the last few years, but life and pandemic stole my focus each time.

Because we want to support slightly different functionality in web and node we want to think about how we can pass the functions that are different as a package. I imagine having the default for the browser/deno and then having a dedicated config package for node.

Something along the lines with

import alasql from 'alasql'
import * as alasqlNodeConf from 'alasql/node-config'
alasql.config(alasqlNodeConf)

Or maybe just publish a wrapper package that does it for you so you end up just doing a import alasql from 'alasql/node' in node.

There are many ways to do it - but we just need to be smart with this so we can keep expanding without changing the ground structure.

Another thing to consider is how best to make the jison output (the code reading the string inputs) to fit into this structure.

[leqwasd]

I would like to contribute there, but.. It is currently ~451 commits behind develop :(

[mathiasrw]

Hah. Yes. We need to recreate the efforts (wellll - actually there is a lot of manual work in converting the files, so it might not be so bad to copy paste the code from the new files instead of the old ones).

First of all, lets find a good philosophy for how we want the repo to work. I am here thinking of the battle between commonjs and the es6 modules, what we have access to of new build tools, and how we would like things to work.

I propose a proof of concept - it does not need to provide the right data - but just compile something we can import and talk about.

[leqwasd]

And how do we approach code splitting?- monorepo?

[mathiasrw]

Code splitting?

[mathiasrw]

I am open to all sorts of inputs. If anyone got good experience with now things can flow smootly im happy to hear. Lets get this thing in better shape.

[mathiasrw]

I moved the discussion from #1240 to this page.

[mathiasrw]

It has been decided that we will transition to use Bun for building and testing.

The work will be picked up in the mwulff/esm branch, and will after passing all tests live in "main" branch that will be made the default branch instead of develop.