Posts tagged dev

August 2021 Update

It’s been more than a month since the 8bitworkshop 3.8.0 release, and I’ve been doing lots of prototyping behind the scenes. Some of this work will end up in dead ends, but we might learn a thing or two along the way. So I thought I’d document everything here.

ECMAScript (aka JavaScript) did not have a standardized module system until ES6, which was published in 2015. The ecosystem is still catching up. For example, some browsers still don’t support ES6 modules in web workers, and Node.js only recently added module support. TypeScript has always supported ES6 modules, but good luck getting it to consume old-style IIFE (“immediately-invoked function expression”) modules, or getting it to play nicely with your Node unit tests … etc.

To handle this hodge-podge of module formats, “bundlers” were developed. These tools eat a pile of source code, images, CSS, whatever – and regurgitate it back in whatever format you need. The downside is that they add another level of complexity to your build system. So I’d been avoiding bundlers, and just using the output from the TypeScript compiler directly from the index.html file.

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