Remove/Replace Rollup.js

[pythoneer]

It would be good to have the option to do without Rollup.js and npm entirely. At least in my case i am searching for Rust frontend tools because i want to stay away from npm and its ecosystem. I don't want to go into details about the "why" here, but i am wondering what alternatives we have. I am not very familiar with perseus yet and going through the book Building Your First App i was unpleasantly surprised to see npm i -g rollup which is a show-stopper in my case. I don't want to elevate this as a major problem for the project, because its just my personal taste – but i am wondering if we could have an easy to integrate (rusty) alternative that is as powerful as Rollup.js yet and can serve the same needs. I am very happy with Trunk and Sycamore/seed-rs/yew and was wondering what exactly is different here that make Rollup.js mandatory.

[lukechu10]

Is there something specific that requires a full-blown bundler? The only js required should be that for loading the wasm.

[arctic-hen7]

I used Rollup simply to create a JS bundle to load the Wasm, and I imagine it could indeed be done without it. I'll look into this further.

[arctic-hen7]

I too have had enough of JS tools, and as a matter of fact Rollup has been the cause of every single bug report on Perseus thus far!

Given that, I'm fully in support of ditching it in favor of another tool. Given this would be a significant breaking change, I think it would be best to have this done by v0.2.0.

[arctic-hen7]

Okay, so I was looking through the codebase trying to figure out why I actually used Rollup in the first place. I then discovered that I'm using it solely to wrap an asynchronous JS function that we don't even need. So in other words not only is this a nice idea for cleanliness, it will also make Perseus builds faster! The only drawback to this is that it requires specifying a new js_init file in the Actix Web integration's options. However, no-one except me uses those at the moment (the CLI does it all for you), so that's not a problem! It is still a breaking change though, so this will be included in v0.2.0.

[arctic-hen7]

This is complete, and will be released with v0.2.0!