Developer Notes

History

We are currently using https://github.com/imranbarbhuiya/esbuild-plugins-node-modules-polyfill
As of this writing (Oct 27, 2023), we are seeing active development on this repo; last commit was 4 days ago.
We tried the following as well:
- https://github.com/remorses/esbuild-plugins
  As per this issue it's known to be broken: remorses/esbuild-plugins#41
- https://www.npmjs.com/package/esbuild-plugin-polyfill-node
  We were getting the issue of eval() not allowed in the extension context due to security reasons, when we were trying to enable the crypto polyfill.

Notes

The imranbarbhuiya/esbuild-plugins-node-modules-polyfill library wraps the JSPM core libraries. But the ESBuild wrapper itself is maintained by a small group of people. This too could go out-of-date/unmaintained some day.

Keep this in mind if issues with eval()s or failed imports of node libraries start popping up.

We need to specify CTL as a dependency in packages.dhall as well as package.json.
- The former is needed for importing CTL from Purescript.
- The latter is needed for esbuild to resolve the JS dependencies used by CTL for bundling.
  - This works because when we specify CTL as a dependency in package.json, all the transitive dependencies get pulled in to node_modules and become available for esbuild.
Important Make sure the versions of CTL in both packages.dhall and package.json are the same.
- Currently we are using the git commit SHA of the latest commit in Purescript 0.15 branch.
  - TODO: Once this is merged into master, use the commit SHA of master.

CTL was giving maximum call stack size exceeded error when used inside Chrome's service workers.
This issue is specific to Chrome.
- Here's a bug report in Chromium. They claim to have resolved it, but there is a post after the bug is marked as resolved, saying the issue is still present. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=252492
- Here's another person's report. They were trying to build a game that and ran into the same issue. This was also a long time after the bug report was marked as resolved. The call stack size seemed unreasonably small. https://www.construct.net/en/forum/construct-3/general-discussion-7/maximum-call-stack-size-using-154930
- Purescript code has >20 lines of imports which all get compiled down to ESM imports. Both ESBuild and Webpack transpile these imports during bundling to function calls, so to concatenate multiple files into one output file without having scope conflicts. The large number of imports seem to be causing the call stack size issue.
Plus, the added overhead of working with Purescript, we decided to eliminate the CTL dependency and re-write the small part of CTL we need to implement CIP30 ourselves, in JS. This will also make the build process much simpler, and reduce the barrier for entry for future contributors.

Chrome:
- Go to extensions page, and turn the Developer Mode switch on.
- Drag and drop artefacts/<extension-name>.crx into the extensions page.
- If the drag and drop seem to be not working:
  - I experienced this issue on Linux (Gnome Wayland).
  - Try dragging it onto the page, if no overlay appears, drop it back where you dragged it from.
  - Repeat this a few times. Should get it working after 2-3 tries.
  - If you drop without the overlay visible, the file will get downloaded instead of getting installed. When you click on the download entry, it will show you CRX_REQUIRED_PROOF_MISSING error.
Firefox:
- Go to extensions page, click the settings icon, select Debug Addons.
- Click Load Temporary Addon and open the .zip or the .xpi file.
- Note: Firefox doesn't support drag and drop installation of extensions for development.

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