should we *continue* to enforce `cargo build --lib`

[ashleygwilliams]

digging into the bug from #303 has made me consider if we should enforce that cargo build build only the lib, by passing --lib. this leads to a few questions:

• are the legitmate reasons to write an binary application that is compiled by wasm-pack and published to npm? i'm thinking that potentially devtools e.g. a CLI application may actually be a use case we want?
• this begs the question... does wasm-pack even work at all right now for that scenario, what would the requirements be? i'm pretty sure that the package.json keys we are using and that we don't put anything in a bin directory would suggest it wouldn't.
• begging the final question: is this something we want to support? if so, what would an interface for this look like?

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EDIT: i want us to enforce lib only until we can reasonable answer the rest of these questions, hence #329

[konstin]

I had a similar situation in pyo3-pack: I started out with only supporting lib and then added bin support later. I ended up always setting --lib for lib targets and --bin for binaries. (Actually --bins, but that's because I haven't done multi-bin projects yet). For python packages the structure is different for binaries and for libraries, so you need to know the target before building anyway and it's a non-effort to set the right flags. I think the same is true for npm packages.

are the legitmate reasons to write an binary application that is compiled by wasm-pack and published to npm? i'm thinking that potentially devtools e.g. a CLI application may actually be a use case we want?

There are actually two different cases to consider: Taking native binaries and distributing them through node and having pure wasm applications. The first case is definitely desirable. e.g. if someone wanted to do py-spy or rbspy for node. For the latter there's afaik no project above toy status that makes standalone wasm files runable, but I expect that to become important in the future. (wasm files run through a js shim are irrelevant here because we can still use --lib for those).

[ashleygwilliams]

closing as this hasn't really gotten attention, when/if it becomes a pressing issue, i'm sure it will come back up