Remove webpack?

[andykais]

We can feasibly replace webpack with babel. This has a few benefits:

• our modules will not be bundled (handy for typescript declaration files & tree shaking)
• we can move away from mocha to something like ava

This would mean no more loader support, so we would need to do #42 and use something like babel-plugin-preval to handle nearley's grammar files.

A note that ideally our only compiler would be typescript. This would only be doable if typescript provided a proper compiler api to handle the above interesting modules & typescript-is. It does not currently have that, so we need either babel or webpack.

[andykais]

update: we are stuck with custom typescript transformers no matter what, since we are using ts specific features like path aliases and typescript-is. We have two options to get proper typescript types emitted by this library.

Stick with webpack:

• debug the ts-loader declaration emitting issue (why are some files being ignored)
• use webpack entry globs so each src file gets its own output file
  • this does have a penalty. Each outputted file is self contained. It means extra boilerplate on each and no shared code
  • I have looked into bundling declaration files and all the solutions are pretty garbo

Use typescript only:

• compile nearley using their nodejs api inside a ts-transformer-preval block (essentially recreating the nearley-loader)
• switch over to ava (mochapack is obviously tied to webpack)
  • one nice tack-on-advantage here is that we drop one layer of compilers, so its in theory faster
• use ttypescript everywhere (unless we get https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/14419 someday)

[andykais]

api-extractor may become a viable option once https://github.com/microsoft/rushstack/issues/1029 is implemented