lambda-nodejs: parcel is too big to bundle

[eladb]

We are looking into releasing the entire AWS CDK as a single library (see aws/aws-cdk-rfcs#6). This basically means that all modules (and their transitive dependencies) will be bundled into a single package.

Recently, we have introduced @aws-cdk/aws-lambda-nodejs as a high level API for writing node.js lambda functions. This construct uses [parcel] in order to bundle all function's dependencies into a single artifact.

The problem is that [parcel] is too big:

• It has 652 transitive dependencies
• 15,558 files
• 100MiB (uncompressed)

This is unrealistic and also introduces an intrinsic security risk posed by including so many dependencies in our project.

Proposal

Let's use parcel as an [undeclared] peer-dependency. Simply require that users declare parcel in their own package.json file. It will also give them more control over which version to use.

[eladb]

@jogold what do you think?

[jogold]

Yes, peer dependency is fine. What do you mean with [undeclared]?

[eladb]

I mean that we won't be able to officially declare it as a "peerDependency" in our package.json because jsii doesn't really know what to do with it, so basically I think at runtime we can do something like require.resolve('parcel/package.json').version and check that we are compatible with the version the user installed.

[jogold]

OK, let me open a PR for this.

[eladb]

Awesome, thanks!