(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
* Put PlainTextInput into its own directory
* Create a directory for RichTextInput
* Create editor-toolbar directory
* Move PreviewButton into editor-toolbar
* The time to refactor this is not quite yet here
* Create tag-editor directory
* Remove some of the uses of WithShortcut
* Remove all uses of WithShortcut from editor package
* Remove last uses of WithShortcut
* Fix typo
* Translate editor to Svelte
Make editor fields grid rather than flexbox
Refactor ButtonToolbar margins
Remove remaining svelte.d.ts symlinks
Implement saveNow
Fix text surrounding
Remove HTML editor button
Clean up some empty files
Add visual for new field state badges
* Adds new IconConstrain.svelte to generalize the icon handling for
IconButton and Badge
Implement sticky functionality again
Enable Editable and Codable field state badges
Add shortcuts to FieldState badges
Add Shift+F9 shortcut back
Add inline padding back to editor fields, tag editor and toolbar
Make Editable and Codable only "visually hidden"
This way they are still updated in the background
Otherwise reshowing them will always start them up empty
Make empty editing area focusable
Start with moving fieldsKey and currentFieldKey to context.ts
Fix Codable being wrong size when opening for first time
Add back drag'n'drop
Make ButtonItem display: contents again
* This will break the gap between ButtonGroup items, however once we
have a newer Chromium version we should use CSS gap property anyway
Fix most of typing issues
Use --label-color background color LabelContainer
Add back red color for dupes
Generalize the editor toolbar in the multiroot editor to widgets
Implement Notification.svelte for showing cloze hints
Add colorful icon to notification
Hook up Editable to EditingArea
Move EditingArea into EditorField
Include editorField in editor/context
Fix rebasing issues
Uniformly use SvelteComponentTyped
Take LabelContainer out of EditingArea
Use mirror-dom and node-store to export editable content
Fix editable update mechanism
Prepare passing the editing inputs as slots
Pass in editing inputs as slots
Use codable options again in codemirror
Delete editor/lib.ts
Remove CodableAdapter, Use more generic CodeMirror component
Fix clicking LabelContainer to focus
Use prettier
Rename Editable to ContentEditable
Fix writing Mathjax from Codable to Editable
Correctly adjust output HTML from editable
Refactor EditableStyles out of EditableContainer
Pass Image and Mathjax Handle via slots to Editable
Make Editable add its editingInputApi
Make Editable hideable
Fix font size not being set correctly
Refactor both fieldFocused and focusInCodable to focusInEditable
Fix focusIfField
Bring back $activeInput
Fix ClozeButton
Remove signifyCustomInput
Refactor MathjaxHandle
Refactor out some logic into store-subscribe
Fix Mathjax editor
Use focusTrap instead of focusing div
Delegate focus back to editingInput when refocusing focusTrap
Elegantly move focus between editing inputs when closing/opening
Make Codable tabbable
Automatically move caret to end on editable and codable
+ remove from editingInput api
Fix ButtonDropdown having two rows and missing button margins
Make svelte_check and eslint pass
Satisfy editor svelte_check
Save field updates to db again
Await editable styles before mounting content editable
Remove unused import from OldEditorAdapter
Add copyright header to OldEditorAdapter
Update button active state from contenteditable
* Use activateStickyShortcuts after waiting for noteEditorPromise
* Set fields via stores, make tags correctly set
* Add explaining comment to setFields
* Fix ClozeButton
* Send focus and blur events again
* Fix Codable not correctly updating on blur with invalid HTML
* Remove old code for special Enter behavior in tags
* Do not use logical properties for ButtonToolbar margins
* Remove getCurrentField
Instead use noteEditor->currentField or noteEditor->activeInput
* Remove Extensible type
* Use context-property for NoteEditor, EditorField and EditingArea
* Rename parameter in mirror-dom.allowResubscription
* Fix cutOrCopy
* Refactor context.ts into the individual components
* Move focusing of editingArea up to editorField
* Rename promiseResolve -> promiseWithResolver
* Rename Editable->RichTextInput and Codable->PlainTextInput
* Remove now unnecessary type assertion for `getNoteEditor` and `getEditingArea`
* Refocus field after adding, so subscription to editing area is refreshed
