On 12/20/2012 9:54 PM, Erik de Bruin wrote:
*tool/vendor dependency:* The Google Closure Tools are Open Source,
available under the Apache License 2.0.
*separation of concerns:*
1) a matter of choice and convenience, I'm not married to "goog" here,
but I haven't seen a good reason NOT to use it, so far.
2) you are probably correct from a purely language translation point
of view. But the "ultimate" goal here is not only a language
translation, but also a framework translation. And I'm sure "some
polyfills" are not enough to create a cross browser UI framework.
3) I'm hearing "different", I'm not sure I hear "better". Why wouldn't
we use the Closure Builder for this? I explain the virtue of this tool
in an earlier email and you can see it in action in the Publisher tool
I set up in the 'develop' branch of the "asjs" section of the SVN
repo.
4) the Closure Builder does a bit more than linking. Please see my
previous remark and email, as well as the documentation available
online.
5) GCC is also more than just an minifier. And we can run it straight
from the cross compiler, as Mike suggested. That leaves us with the
option of keeping the intermediate JS code as an supplement output.
*testing:* never implied that GCC or anything would free us from
testing any part of the code. And creating optimised/minified code
straight from the cross compiler - without using an external tool as
you seem to imply - would mean that we'd have to write our own
optimiser/minifier into it. I'm not familiar with creating such a
tool, but that sounds like a lot of work.
*source maps:* I don't know what you mean by this, so I can't argue
either direction :-)
Like I emphasised before, and I'll repeat it every time it comes up:
there is, at least not at this point in the development, an absolutely
right nor absolutely wrong approach. I think we should look for the
best of both approaches. Our approaches are essentially similar (only
the tools differ) and I think both have strengths and weaknesses.
Let's work on this a bit and than revisit this discussion and decide
on the merits which one fullfils which requirements best.
Have a great holiday, and keep having fun!
EdB
I am signing off under Erik post and his thoughts
