Use global underscore instead of lo-dash about meteor-webpack-react

[jedwards1211]

The deps are in an awkward state actually, I've been thinking about it. dependencies get installed for an npm package and any packages that depend on it. devDependencies only get installed for the package itself -- only when you npm install in that package's folder. But it would be weird to use this project as an npm package (i.e. npm install --save meteor-webpack-react) so I'm thinking we should move all the deps to one or the other.

Webpack externals doesn't quite work like that -- rather, if one webpack bundle marks react as an external, react doesn't get built into that bundle but it's still able to require it from the host webpack bundle or something like that (I don't know enough to be technically precise about it).

Webpack as a resolve.alias option that would work for sharing underscore. We could do it like this:

exportUnderscore.js:

export default window._;

webpack config:

{
  resolve: {
    alias: {
      'underscore$': path.join(__dirname, './exportUnderscore.js');
    }
  }
}

[jedwards1211]

Oh yeah, and right now I'm pretty sure lodash is only being used to extend the webpack configs, for instance in webpack.config.client.dev.js, which means it's not actually being built into the bundles :)

[AdamBrodzinski]

Oooh right I keep forgetting it doesn't get bundled unless you require it 😄

Using resolve for underscore might be useful if you want to do import {map, reduce} from 'underscore'; though. Not sure if it should be for the boilerplate though. The only part that makes think it should is that Meteor has a hard dependency on it so it'll be available regardless. I guess you could still do const {map, reduce} = _;

[jedwards1211]

Actually the import syntax probably should work! Because it would just transpile to something equivalent to require('underscore').map etc. The only problem is requiring internals like react/lib/... for instance.

[jedwards1211]

Actually, we should be using

externals: {
  'underscore$': {
    root: '_',
  }
}

And I think we might as well go ahead and put this in the configs. I'm busy preparing a prototype for a demo so I don't have much time to fiddle with this project this week, but hopefully next week I can set up releases and get a lot of these issues knocked out.

[AdamBrodzinski]

Closing this (unless you think it should still be open), its worth noting that the underscore Meteor uses is super old so using the latest lo-dash offers someone semver, modular builds and more features (what i'm currently doing).

[jedwards1211]

Heh, I wonder if they depend on some old behavior that got fixed? Oh well, probably not that many kb anyway

[AdamBrodzinski]

Yea they tried upgrading but minor bumps would break meteor core so it's frozen to a 2013 version lol. They talked about migrating to lodash eventually but it was low on their priorities