Tasks cleanup

[resir014]

Our current gulpfile/tasks pipeline has grown too much it might be overwhelming for new users to get started with the starter kit. Rewriting the entire tasks system should be our main priority before upgrading to TS 2.3.

• Make each features of the starter kit (e.g. testing, etc.) optional (yo generator perhaps?)
• Improve the available guides to be noob-friendly (assume users have no prior knowledge of JS)
• Consider ditching gulp for other better alternatives (pure npm tasks/brunch) (might have to ditch the flattened directory option)
• Look into using brunch (idea: @bryanbecker) We might just use pure npm tasks + Webpack after all.

[kotarou]

A setup script that allowed selection of options would be excellent, e.g.

What style of linting do you want? (S)trict, (l)oose, or (n)one?
Do you wish to remove comments?
Do you want your TS to be compiled strictly?
Should testing and code-coverage systems be installed? (Y)es, (t)ests only, (n)o...
etc.

Even though these examples may be single line changes, it can be intimidating to find where to make them, especially while also dealing with the huge number of new things to install.

[bryanbecker]

I know this is about "clean-up", but if we are adding configurable options, I think the profiler should be considered as well

[resir014]

@bryanbecker We could do that, yes.

Speaking of which, do we want to make the logger (located in src/lib/logger) to be a separate module as well? If yes, I could ask @ezolenko (he originally wrote it) if he wants to do that.

[kotarou]

I think that having both the logger and profiler as selectable modules is an excellent idea.

[bryanbecker]

Perhaps a few question that should be decided first are:

• Do we assume the user has starting knowledge of typescript?
• If not, does this project provide a guide?
• (same two above questions, but for Screeps)

[resir014]

@bryanbecker

Do we assume the user has starting knowledge of typescript?

I think we should really start assuming that the users have little to no knowledge of TypeScript, since we've already seen quite a few Screeps newcomers would come across this project (sometimes with even no prior knowledge of JS), wanting to know what this project is all about.

In which case...

If not, does this project provide a guide?

The readme that we currently have is the only guide that we have right now, and I have to admit that I'm not that good at writing guides.

We should provide the bare essentials to get started on the readme, and use the currently-empty wiki as a community-maintained effort to provide some noob-friendly guides on how to get started on the starter kit itself, or in general (TypeScript, Screeps, etc.)

[kotarou]

I agree, we should assume very little knowledge.

I am happy to write a guide for the wiki here, but I wonder - should we instead (also?) provide a guide on TS for the actual screeps website?

[bryanbecker]

I agree that we should approach it as a tool for beginners.

I quite like the logger. It was useful to me as an example on how to use memory to store config data. It would be disappointing if it was moved to a separate where it may be ignored by beginners.

Also, might want to keep the wiki ts-related. Considering the Screeps' wiki pays real $$ for contributions, the wiki here may not get too much use for Screeps content

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On a different topic, does the current set-up support webpack's "dead code elimination"?

If so, we could take a much more configurable and user-friendly approach for some things by using build toggles

[resir014]

On a different topic, does the current set-up support webpack's "dead code elimination"?

Not at the moment, but it's a useful feature to have.

[bryanbecker]

Looking at brunch now... it provides "skeleton" features, which would make this project nicer

https://github.com/brunch/brunch-guide/blob/master/content/en/chapter02-getting-started.md

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Update: I no longer think brunch is a good choice for this project (see below). I'm looking into seeing how much we can get done with webpack alone

From version 1.8.2 up to current version, this plugin may report TypeScript errors that you are not expecting. This is due to the fact that this plugin compiles each file separately in isolation, and doesn't take advantage of the full TypeScript project. As such there are some errors which may appear which are false positives.

Starting in 1.8.3 you could add an ignoreErrors property the plugin config object in the brunch-config file. This was an array of error numbers to ignore. Starting in 2.0.1, you can ignore all TypeScript errors by setting ignoreErrors to true (this was broken in 2.0.0). Setting it to an array still works as before.

We are hoping to support the full language service, at least for brunch build at some point, but until then, we recommend that you add tsc --noEmit to your test script or build script to catch proper errors within your project.

Just to note that this shouldn't affect any TypeScript support your editor/IDE provides, which should also allow you to identify real errors.

[resir014]

@bryanbecker Cool. I'm going to start experimenting on removing gulp this weekend as well.

[bryanbecker]

If anyone can provide a list of exactly what tasks the old gulpfile did, I think that would help in the rewrite