docs: Update CONTRIBUTING.md #4886
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rschristian
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Aug 14, 2025
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| ### Why does the code base often use `let` instead of `const`? | ||
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| There is no real reason for that other a historical one. Back before auto-formatting via prettier was a thing and minifiers weren't as advanced as they are today we used a pretty terse code-style. The code-style deliberately was aimed at making code look as concise and short as possible. The `let` keyword is a bit shorter than `const` to write, so we only used that. This was done only for stylistic reasons. | ||
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| This helped our minds to not lose sight of focusing on size, but made it difficult for newcomers to start contributing to Preact. For that reason alone we switched to `prettier` and loosened our rule regarding usage of `let` or `const`. Today we use both, but you can still find many existing places where `let` is still in use. | ||
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| In the end there is no effect on size regardless if you use `const`, `let` or use both. Our code is downtranspiled to `ES5` for npm so both will be replaced with `var` anyways. Therefore it doesn't really matter at all which one is used in our codebase. | ||
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| This will only become important once shipping modern JavaScript code on npm becomes a thing and bundlers follow suit. | ||
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I don't think we have too many weird let/consts these days, so I think this whole section is rather unnecessary? I'm not sure anyone would actually ask this question is all.
Can revert if we want it for the "Our code is downtranspiled to ES5...` info though.
| - `main` - This is the main development branch and represents the upcoming v11 release line. | ||
| - `v10.x` - This branch represents the current stable release line, v10. | ||
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| As we have yet to release v11, contributors are welcome to use either branch to build upon. We will try to port changes between the branches when possible, to keep them in sync, but if you're feeling generous, we'd love if you'd submit PRs to both branches! |
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Verbiage recommendations welcome, if anyone has them. Not sure I love this line as-is.
JoviDeCroock
approved these changes
Aug 16, 2025
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Mainly adds mention of the current
main/v10.xsituation, just to mirror what's in the ReadMe, and corrects the oldkarma&mochareferences now that they're gone.I don't actually know what the release process looks like these days, but it might be worth updating the instructions and removing/replacing the v8 instructions as we haven't had a release there in nearly 6 years.