Rollup build proof of concept

[outofambit]

Did a quick proof of concept on replacing browserify with rollup to aid discussion in #3425. This is here mostly to have a convenient place for others to see the diff. :)

I only touched browserify.js (and not combineModules.js), so I couldn't remove any npm dependencies. However I was able to remove the need for derequire and uglify in the build, so they could be removed (from package.json and Gruntfile.js) if combineModules.js is also ported to use rollup.

If you want to try it out locally, checkout this branch and then:

$ npm i
$ npm run grunt rollup
$ npm run grunt rollup:min

😄

[limzykenneth]

@outofambit Have you tried a Parcel setup? From what I see here it seems that it's including several additional plugins to be able to build what we want. I had a quick try with Parcel simply running parcel build ./src/app.js and seems to get a full minified version of the library, it's working as far as my manual test go but I haven't been able to swap it out so that it runs our test suite.

I think Parcel is pretty promising in this sense as I did not have to do any additional thing at all, no plugins no configs and it already minifies and includes json. Not sure if anything else is needed though.

[outofambit]

@limzykenneth I haven’t tried Parcel yet, but that sounds promising! I was also disappointed in the number of plugins needed for pretty basic functionality in rollup. (From reading issues in rollup’s repo, there’s a lot of discussion around this.)

When I have some more time I’ll put up another test branch with parcel 🙂

[outofambit]

I also found https://github.com/developit/microbundle, a wrapper for rollup that looks much simpler. Might be worth also trying out.

[outofambit]

closing this in favor of continuing exploration in #3431 🚀