Proposal: Make build -with-deps a default behaviour

1

A problem with rescript build is that it doesn’t rebuild a package when a new version is installed. It’s especially critical when multiple developers are working on a project. Often they don’t know when some package is updated to run rescript build -with-deps.

To solve the problem, we have -with-deps in all our scripts, including the ones with watch mode. I think it makes sense to make it a default behavior and add something like -without-deps as @tsnobip suggested in the [ANN] ReScript 9.1.4 release - #3 by tsnobip.

I think it’ll be a more reliable default, even if the issue with rebuilding packages when the version change is fixed.

8 Likes
2

I also have -with-deps flag on all my build scripts

3

During the last two months, I got two issues on GitHub and a question in telegram about my library not working. The reason was that they were changing the suffix option in bs-config and running rescript build.
I think it’s not normal that three random people got a very difficult-to-debug error which can be easily prevented by having the -with-deps flag turned on by default.

image
image1280×224 44.9 KB

1 Like
4

I’m all for making it the default.

2 Likes
5

Yes let’s help people fall into the pit of success.

4 Likes
6

any benefit in introducing --without-deps with the change?

7

What does --with-deps do? I have a pnpm monorepo with custom Jest bindings in it’s own package, and anytime I modify the Jest package I have to run npx rescript clean to pick up the changes, is that related?

8

We could wait until someone comes to this forum and says “hey my builds are taking too long” and then add it.

9

With -with-deps you don’t need to run rescript build, just restart the compiler.

It doesn’t build the dependencies in watch mode.

Especially useful when working in a team and pulling changes with a ReScript package updated. With -with-deps it’ll just work. While without it you’ll first get a weird compile/runtime error, and then need to run rescript clean to fix it.

1 Like
10

I don’t see a need for this.

11

I’ve made the PR to compiler Make build -with-deps a default behaviour by DZakh · Pull Request #6350 · rescript-lang/rescript-compiler · GitHub

4 Likes
12

I don’t think the performance makes any difference on modern machines, it’s 30-40ms on my apple silicon mac, but it would be nice if -with-deps didn’t print the full list of dependencies every time (although printing things it needs to build would be ok).

1 Like
13

Which rescript version do you use?

14

That is with version 10. My big production project doesn’t support 11 at the moment (it’s been mothballed for 2 years).

I don’t have a ton of dependencies at the moment, but it’s a monorepo and I would eventually like to make each sub-project a dependency. I suppose if I switch to rewatch I won’t be using rescript to build directly :thinking:

1 Like