[RFC] sync API about repack

[RafikiTiki]

Yeah, keeping the async as the default sounds good! And since we have a technological possibility to implement a sync method let's do that – maybe someone will benefit from it in a way that's not obvious to us now.

[thymikee]

Agree on keeping the default. How big of a maintenance investment would it be to implement, test and document the loadScriptSync method? Frankly I would wait for the opportunity to solve the real problem to arise before publishing the API and hoping for adoption

[troZee]

@jbroma done

[jbroma]

I agree with @RafikiTiki, we would need to integrate it in a way that would allow for such optimisation in this rare case and keep async loadScript as default.

[jbroma]

@troZee please update the description 🙏 thanks!

[jbroma]

Personally, I'm not sure whether sync API is useful as loadScript is called only for the async chunks right now.

The only thing that comes to mind where this would be helpful is that we could split the the main chunk into smaller chunks and allow them to be OTA updated. As all chunks would be required at startup, the sync API could prove useful there.

To me it looks like loadScript is the only sensible candidate to leverage the sync API

[RafikiTiki]

Typically a user should see a loading screen/indicator when a script is being fetched and evaluated. Having sync API for loading a script would only make sense for local chunks but then it would be a little quirky to decide whether to use sync or async method 🤔

Edit: on top of that, in the linked docs we discourage users from using local chunks if they are using Hermes because it might result in degraded performance.

[jbroma]

@thymikee WDYT

[jbroma]

loadScript is used mostly internally, although it is exposed as a public API and can be used on it's own. I imagine we would have to add a field to Script config returned from resolver to turn on synchronous loading like this:

import { ScriptManager, Script } from '@callstack/repack/client';

ScriptManager.shared.addResolver(async (scriptId) => {
  // In development, get all the chunks from dev server.
  if (__DEV__) {
    return {
      url: Script.getDevServerURL(scriptId),
      cache: false,
    };
  }

  // In production, get chunks matching the regex from filesystem.
  if (/^.+\.local$/.test(scriptId)) {
    return {
      url: Script.getFileSystemURL(scriptId),
      sync: true   // <------- 
    };
  } else {
    return {
      url: Script.getRemoteURL(`https://my-domain.dev/${scriptId}`),
    };
  }
});

Maintenance wise, this is not part of something that changes often (or at all) from my experience, we can also consider marking it as experimental.

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[DivyatejaChe]

Typically a user should see a loading screen/indicator when a script is being fetched and evaluated. Having sync API for loading a script would only make sense for local chunks but then it would be a little quirky to decide whether to use sync or async method 🤔

Edit: on top of that, in the linked docs we discourage users from using local chunks if they are using Hermes because it might result in degraded performance.

hey @RafikiTiki , do you have any results/ performance benchmarks that support this statement? For any super-app development, are there any guidelines around when/ how to choose certain parts of your app as Remote vs Local Chunks?

@jbroma please do add as well

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