Remove any-promise dependency

[cgewecke]

Description

The any-promise package has an unsafe dereferencing of the window object in its code that throws in the Web Worker environment. This PR removes it and falls back on native promises.

What does any-promise do? (from their README)

NOTE: You probably want native promises now

Let your library support any ES 2015 (ES6) compatible Promise and leave the choice to application authors. The application can optionally register its preferred Promise implementation and it will be exported when requiring any-promise from library code.

If no preference is registered, defaults to the global Promise for newer Node.js versions. The browser version defaults to the window Promise, so polyfill or register as necessary.

Essentially, consumers of Web3 can decide which promise to use and Web3 will respect that, since it (usually) requires Promise from any-promise.

Hard to know if anyone is relying on this...

Resources

• Most browsers support native Promises - exceptions are IE11 and Opera mini.
• IE 11 lifecycle FAQ advises users to switch to IE Edge
• PR Use any-promise for everything #1415 (March 2018) standardized use of any-promise at Web3

Fixes #3377 #2211 #1774

Type of change

• Bug fix (probably non-breaking?)

Checklist:

• I have selected the correct base branch.
• I have performed a self-review of my own code.
• I have commented my code, particularly in hard-to-understand areas.
• I have made corresponding changes to the documentation.
• My changes generate no new warnings.
• Any dependent changes have been merged and published in downstream modules.
• I ran npm run dtslint with success and extended the tests and types if necessary.
• I ran npm run test:unit with success.
• I have executed npm run test:cov and my test cases do cover all lines and branches of the added code.
• I ran npm run build-all and tested the resulting file/'s from dist folder in a browser.
• I have updated the CHANGELOG.md file in the root folder.
• I have tested my code on the live network.

[coveralls]

Coverage decreased (-0.009%) to 86.047% when pulling 798faeb on issue/3377 into e937387 on 1.x.

[nivida]

[EDIT - this coverage drop is due to web3-eth-accounts/src/index.js getting smaller after removing a require statement, increasing the proportion of uncovered lines]

Verified ✅

[nivida]

@cgewecke Oh! Have you done some further tests with the PromiEvent object? It would probably be the perfect moment to add some additional test cases for it :)

... and did you also thought about to fix this upstream instead of removing it? (I think the possibility is here that some depending projects do want to support IE11)

Edit:

add some additional test cases for it

"add some explicit test cases for it" this is probably the better wording.

[holgerd77]

Would also agree that keeping this dependency causes more problems than helping to address. Also adding a Can-I-use-Web-Workers table here for reference. Generally have to say that I have not very much of a picture of how widely web workers are used atm.

[cgewecke]

@nivida

did you also thought about to fix this upstream instead of removing it?

Yes. There have been no changes to any-promise for ~4 years. The problem with the window object has been raised there before in any-promise 29.

On the surface, the lib seems abandoned / a historical artifact but according to npm it continues see significant increases in usage. Its weekly downloads have almost doubled in the last year (base = 1.5 mil)

RE: testing. I don't know what test to add here. If you can think of one, will happily add.