(for upgrading users, please see the notes at the bottom)
Bazel brought a lot of nice things to the table, such as rebuilds based on
content changes instead of modification times, caching of build products,
detection of incorrect build rules via a sandbox, and so on. Rewriting the build
in Bazel was also an opportunity to improve on the Makefile-based build we had
prior, which was pretty poor: most dependencies were external or not pinned, and
the build graph was poorly defined and mostly serialized. It was not uncommon
for fresh checkouts to fail due to floating dependencies, or for things to break
when trying to switch to an older commit.
For day-to-day development, I think Bazel served us reasonably well - we could
generally switch between branches while being confident that builds would be
correct and reasonably fast, and not require full rebuilds (except on Windows,
where the lack of a sandbox and the TS rules would cause build breakages when TS
files were renamed/removed).
Bazel achieves that reliability by defining rules for each programming language
that define how source files should be turned into outputs. For the rules to
work with Bazel's sandboxing approach, they often have to reimplement or
partially bypass the standard tools that each programming language provides. The
Rust rules call Rust's compiler directly for example, instead of using Cargo,
and the Python rules extract each PyPi package into a separate folder that gets
added to sys.path.
These separate language rules allow proper declaration of inputs and outputs,
and offer some advantages such as caching of build products and fine-grained
dependency installation. But they also bring some downsides:
- The rules don't always support use-cases/platforms that the standard language
tools do, meaning they need to be patched to be used. I've had to contribute a
number of patches to the Rust, Python and JS rules to unblock various issues.
- The dependencies we use with each language sometimes make assumptions that do
not hold in Bazel, meaning they either need to be pinned or patched, or the
language rules need to be adjusted to accommodate them.
I was hopeful that after the initial setup work, things would be relatively
smooth-sailing. Unfortunately, that has not proved to be the case. Things
frequently broke when dependencies or the language rules were updated, and I
began to get frustrated at the amount of Anki development time I was instead
spending on build system upkeep. It's now about 2 years since switching to
Bazel, and I think it's time to cut losses, and switch to something else that's
a better fit.
The new build system is based on a small build tool called Ninja, and some
custom Rust code in build/. This means that to build Anki, Bazel is no longer
required, but Ninja and Rust need to be installed on your system. Python and
Node toolchains are automatically downloaded like in Bazel.
This new build system should result in faster builds in some cases:
- Because we're using cargo to build now, Rust builds are able to take advantage
of pipelining and incremental debug builds, which we didn't have with Bazel.
It's also easier to override the default linker on Linux/macOS, which can
further improve speeds.
- External Rust crates are now built with opt=1, which improves performance
of debug builds.
- Esbuild is now used to transpile TypeScript, instead of invoking the TypeScript
compiler. This results in faster builds, by deferring typechecking to test/check
time, and by allowing more work to happen in parallel.
As an example of the differences, when testing with the mold linker on Linux,
adding a new message to tags.proto (which triggers a recompile of the bulk of
the Rust and TypeScript code) results in a compile that goes from about 22s on
Bazel to about 7s in the new system. With the standard linker, it's about 9s.
Some other changes of note:
- Our Rust workspace now uses cargo-hakari to ensure all packages agree on
available features, preventing unnecessary rebuilds.
- pylib/anki is now a PEP420 implicit namespace, avoiding the need to merge
source files and generated files into a single folder for running. By telling
VSCode about the extra search path, code completion now works with generated
files without needing to symlink them into the source folder.
- qt/aqt can't use PEP420 as it's difficult to get rid of aqt/__init__.py.
Instead, the generated files are now placed in a separate _aqt package that's
added to the path.
- ts/lib is now exposed as @tslib, so the source code and generated code can be
provided under the same namespace without a merging step.
- MyPy and PyLint are now invoked once for the entire codebase.
- dprint will be used to format TypeScript/json files in the future instead of
the slower prettier (currently turned off to avoid causing conflicts). It can
automatically defer to prettier when formatting Svelte files.
- svelte-check is now used for typechecking our Svelte code, which revealed a
few typing issues that went undetected with the old system.
- The Jest unit tests now work on Windows as well.
If you're upgrading from Bazel, updated usage instructions are in docs/development.md and docs/build.md. A summary of the changes:
- please remove node_modules and .bazel
- install rustup (https://rustup.rs/)
- install rsync if not already installed (on windows, use pacman - see docs/windows.md)
- install Ninja (unzip from https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/releases/tag/v1.11.1 and
place on your path, or from your distro/homebrew if it's 1.10+)
- update .vscode/settings.json from .vscode.dist
* Make eslint sort our imports
* fix missing deps in eslint rule (dae)
Caught on Linux due to the stricter sandboxing
* Remove exports-last eslint rule (for now?)
* Adjust browserslist settings
- We use ResizeObserver which is not supported in browsers like KaiOS,
Baidu or Android UC
* Raise minimum iOS version 13.4
- It's the first version that supports ResizeObserver
* Apply new eslint rules to sort imports
* Add _bytes methods for all methods in the backend
Expose get_note in qt/aqt/mediasrv.py
* Satisfy formatter
* Rename _bytes function to _raw and have them bytes as input
* Fix backend generation
* Use lib/proto/deckOptions in deck-options
* Add exposed_backend to qt/aqt/mediasrv.py
* Move some more backend methods to exposed_backend_list
* Use protobufjs for congrats and i18n
* Use protobufjs for completeTag
* Use protobufjs services in change-notetype
* Reorder post handlers in alphabetical manner
* Satisfy tests
* Remove unused collection methods
* Rename access_backend to raw_backend_request
* Use _vendor.stringcase instead of creating a new function
* Remove SKIP_UNROLL_OUTPUT
* Directly call _run_command in non _raw methods
* Remove TranslateString, ChangeNotetype and CompleteTag from SKIP_UNROLL_INPUT
* Remove UpdateDeckConfigs from SKIP_UNROLL_INPUT
* Remove ChangeNotetype from SKIP_UNROLL_INPUT
* Remove SKIP_UNROLL_INPUT
* Fix typing issue with translate_string
- Adds typing support for Protobuf maps in genbackend.py
* Do not emit convenience method for protobuf TranslateString
* Add thousands comma separator for card counts graph
* Fix Answer Buttons graph's tooltip
Changes to the "times pressed" heading
* Shows the percent of that button out of all the presses
* Comma separates total on thousands
* Update CONTRIBUTERS
* Wider spacing for graph tables
* Switch to locale-based stats numbers
* Update CONTRIBUTORS
Wrong email?
* Fix counts graph on narrow devices
Graph and table now align in a column when the device's screen is narrow. Columns widths are bounded to not get too wide
* Rename toLocaleXXX functions
* toLocaleNumber -> localizedNumber
* toLocaleString -> localizedDate
Also cleans up sketchy "card counts" table formatting
* Localize more numbers
Uses locale-based rounding for more numbers now
* Localize graph axis ticks
* Fix future-due graph tooltip
* avoid div by zero (dae)
Ignoring NaN in localizedNumber() could potentially mask a mistake
in the future - better to explicitly handle the invalid case at the
source instead.
* Flip arrows of Bootstrap-styled <select>s for RTL langs
* Use the dir attribute to set document direction
* Remove unused variable and fix use of CSS var
Merging note: the typing changes were fixed in a separate PR.
* Put rootDirs into subprojects
- typings do not work for any ts or svelte files
- if we set the 'rootDirs' in ts/tsconfig.json to '../bazel-bin/ts' and then inherit
them from e.g. editor, the root will be changed to '../../bazel-bin/ts',
however editor needs look in '../../bazel-bin/ts/editor' instead.
* Rename i18n and i18n_helpers to i18n-generated and i18n
- This way, we can restrict the awkwardness of importing files outside
the ts directory within lib
* Fix missing typing of i18n and backend_proto by adding back symlinks
* Split up i18n-generated into i18n-{translate,modules}
* Change i18n from singleton to functions
* Revert "Put rootDirs into subprojects"
This partially reverts commit e1d4292ce3979e7b7ee21bf3951b8a462d45c29c.
It seems like this might not be necessary after all.
However some other change made on this branch seems to have fixed
the .svelte.d.ts imports
* Introduce i18n-bundles to remove circular import
There was a circular import i18n.ts <-> i18n-translate.ts
* Create own directory for i18n
* Move lib/i18n/translate to lib/translate
* This restores tree shaking
* Update tsconfig libs and module
* es2018-2020 have wide support on all modern browsers including
* Switch bundles and langs inside i18n to variables again
* Add missing copyright header
* Rename translate.ts to ftl.ts
* Remove the symlinks again
I added them to fix to have completion for tr, however this would have
also have meant to abandon the tree shaking.
As we want to have tree shaking, it's also not necessary to have the
symlinks anymore
* Revert "Update tsconfig libs and module"
This reverts commit 0a96776a475e9901c1f9f3407c726d1d002fb9ef.
* move withCollapsedWhitespace back to i18n/utils
* Add back /ts as in rootDirs
