A JavaScript bundle optimizer.
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Sebastian Markbage 81bc21fad8 Delete node-cli Option and all the Node.js intrinsics (#2267)
Summary:
Since I'm adding a new experiment I figured I'd delete an equivalent sized one.

Last year I added an option that runs the Prepack program by invoking Node.js JS runtime which lets us prepack the whole module system and initialization. It's essentially a packager with perfect Node.js module resolution semantics. It did this by modeling Node's native environment as Prepack bindings.

This PR removes that whole option.

There's a few reasons why I don't think that worked out as a good idea.

- It's not solving a real need. It is hard to keep different module systems in tact. There is always something in the ecosystem that breaks down and using the canonical one solves that. However, in practice, if there is a need for bundling the ecosystem itself adapts to the toolchain. So it's not actually that hard to bundle up a CLI even with Webpack, even if it's strictly not 100% compatible, by tweaking a few downstream depenencies.

- Running the resulting bundle is tricky. The resulting bundle includes the JS parts of Node. This overlaps with what Node.js adds at runtime so it runs it twice. The ideal is actually to build a custom distribution of Node.js but this is generally overkill for what people want.

- Bindings change a lot. While Node.js's API notoriously doesn't change much. The internals do change a lot. By picking the API boundary in the middle of the internals of Node.js, it risks changing with any version. While technically observable changes, nobody else relies on these details. If this option was worth its weight, someone could probably maintain it but so far that has not been the case so we had to disable this option in CI to upgrade Node.

However, going forward I think there are alternative approaches we can explore.

- First class module system. This is something we really need at some point. A first class module system would be able to load Node.js module files from disk and package them up while excluding others. It doesn't have to be literally Node.js's module system. Close enough is ok. Especially as standards compliant ECMAScript modules get more popular. This lets us target compiling output that runs after Node's initialization.

- By introducing havocing and membranes in the boundaries, it becomes possible to initialize Node.js modules without actually knowing the internal of the boundaries.

- We've started optimizing residual functions which is much more interesting. However, this requires that code puts some constraints on how it works with its environment. It's not designed to be fully backwards compatible. That's probably a good thing but that also means that we can put constraints on the modules being Prepacked.

This removes the ability to prepack Prepack itself which is unfortunate but already wasn't being tested. To speed up Prepack itself, the [LLVM backend](https://github.com/facebook/prepack/pull/2264) seems much more useful if it can ever work on Prepack itself.
Pull Request resolved: https://github.com/facebook/prepack/pull/2267

Differential Revision: D8863788

Pulled By: sebmarkbage

fbshipit-source-id: d777ec9a95c8523b3386cfad553d9f691ec59074
2018-07-16 13:09:59 -07:00
.circleci Make CircleCI fail if not enough 262 tests pass (#2263) 2018-07-16 08:44:59 -07:00
assets Adding raw Prepack Logo assets (#2189) 2018-07-03 12:45:47 -07:00
bin Cleanup files 2017-12-12 11:12:24 -08:00
fb-www Make React tests fast (#2187) 2018-07-02 11:25:58 -07:00
flow-libs Set up adapter communication channel with Prepack 2017-10-27 12:54:08 -07:00
flow-typed/npm Upgrade Prepack to Babel 7 (#2256) 2018-07-14 09:55:18 -07:00
scripts Delete node-cli Option and all the Node.js intrinsics (#2267) 2018-07-16 13:09:59 -07:00
src Delete node-cli Option and all the Node.js intrinsics (#2267) 2018-07-16 13:09:59 -07:00
test Delete node-cli Option and all the Node.js intrinsics (#2267) 2018-07-16 13:09:59 -07:00
website Delete node-cli Option and all the Node.js intrinsics (#2267) 2018-07-16 13:09:59 -07:00
.eslintignore Upgrade Prepack to Babel 7 (#2256) 2018-07-14 09:55:18 -07:00
.eslintrc Prettier 1.13.4 fixes 2018-06-06 12:49:59 -07:00
.flowconfig Upgrade Prepack to Babel 7 (#2256) 2018-07-14 09:55:18 -07:00
.gitignore Optimize ReactEquivalenceSet (#2243) 2018-07-13 13:40:00 -07:00
.gitmodules Initial commit 2017-03-28 20:52:41 -07:00
.prettierrc Run Prettier checks on CI (#2212) 2018-07-10 09:55:23 -07:00
.watchmanconfig Add React functional component folding 2017-11-06 05:07:36 -08:00
babel.config.js Upgrade Prepack to Babel 7 (#2256) 2018-07-14 09:55:18 -07:00
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md Add COC to Prepack 2017-11-20 21:33:13 -08:00
CONTRIBUTING.md add reading wiki link to places 2018-05-13 09:25:59 -07:00
LICENSE Initial commit 2017-03-28 20:52:41 -07:00
package.json Delete node-cli Option and all the Node.js intrinsics (#2267) 2018-07-16 13:09:59 -07:00
PATENTS Initial commit 2017-03-28 20:52:41 -07:00
README.md Adding raw Prepack Logo assets (#2189) 2018-07-03 12:45:47 -07:00
webpack.config.js Upgrade Prepack to Babel 7 (#2256) 2018-07-14 09:55:18 -07:00
yarn.lock Upgrade Prepack to Babel 7 (#2256) 2018-07-14 09:55:18 -07:00

Prepack Circle CI

Prepack is a partial evaluator for JavaScript. Prepack rewrites a JavaScript bundle, resulting in JavaScript code that executes more efficiently. For initialization-heavy code, Prepack works best in an environment where JavaScript parsing is effectively cached.

See the official prepack.io website for an introduction and an interactive REPL playground.

How to use Prepack

Install the CLI via npm,

$ npm install -g prepack

Or if you prefer yarn, make sure you get yarn first,

$ npm install -g yarn

and then install the Prepack CLI via yarn:

$ yarn global add prepack

You may need to prepend (pun intended!) the command with sudo in some cases.

Let the party begin

To compile a file and print the output to the console:

$ prepack script.js

If you want to compile a file and output to another file:

$ prepack script.js --out script-processed.js

Detailed instructions and the API can be found at Prepack CLI: Getting Started

Plugins to other tools

The following are a few plugins to other tools. They have been created and are maintained separately from Prepack itself. If you run into any issues with those plugins, please ask the plugin maintainers for support.

Status

How to get the code

  1. Clone repository and make it your current directory.
  2. git submodule init
  3. git submodule update --init
  4. Get yarn and node, then do yarn

Note: For development work you really need yarn, as many scripts require it.

How to build, lint, type check

  1. Get the code
  2. yarn build
    You can later run yarn watch in the background to just compile changed files on the fly.
  3. yarn lint
  4. yarn flow

How to run tests

  1. Get the code
  2. Make sure the code is built, either by running yarn build or yarn watch
  3. yarn test

You can run individual test suites as follows:

  • yarn test-serializer
    This tests the interpreter and serializer. All tests should pass.
  • yarn test-test262
    This tests conformance against the test262 suite. Not all will pass, increasing conformance is work in progress.

How to run the interpreter

  1. Get the code
  2. Make sure the code is built, either by running yarn build or yarn watch
  3. yarn repl
    This starts an interactive interpreter session.

How to run Prepack

  1. Get the code

  2. Make sure the code is built, either by running yarn build or yarn watch.

  3. Have a JavaScript file handy that you want to prepack, for example:
    echo "function hello() { return 'hello'; } function world() { return 'world'; } s = hello() + ' ' + world();" >/tmp/sample.js

  4. cat /tmp/sample.js | yarn prepack-cli
    Try --help for more options.

How to validate changes

Instead of building, linting, type checking, testing separately, the following does everything together:
yarn validate

How to edit the website

The content for prepack.io resides in the website directory of this repository. To make changes, submit a pull request, just like for any code changes.

In order to run the website locally at localhost:8000:

  1. Build prepack into the website: yarn build && mv prepack.min.js website/js
  2. Run python -m SimpleHTTPServer (Python 2) or python -m http.server (Python 3) from the website/ directory

How to contribute

To read more about the project, check out this suggested reading wiki

For more information about contributing pull requests and issues, see our Contribution Guidelines.

License

Prepack is BSD-licensed. We also provide an additional patent grant.