Thought on a package manager for ReScript

[cometkim]

First of all, I wanna make it clear that this is not an opinion on first-class ReScript tooling.

I made yarn-plugin-rescript before, and the experience of using the third-party tooling was actually very good.

But it still has sharp edges, And it is for P'n'P.

The only feature ReScript needs to work without NPM is to extract the bsconfig.json dependency tree and emit it to the node_modules path.

On the other hand, when I working on the rescript-deno project, I really wanted a package manager because, additionally, Deno requires ReScript users to manage import maps to resolve node_modules dependencies.

I can say unless ReScript doesn't include Node.js binary itself, it's awkward that it relies heavily on node_modules resolution.

A list of things I feel really needed for ReScript projects to have a platform-agnostic toolchain:

• Managing of ReScript binaries
• Managing of prebuilt PPX binaries
• Fetching only BS dependencies directly from the NPM registry.
• Sandboxing module resolution behavior and emit platform-specific like node_modules or import_maps on demand.
• Other toolings (init, config, scripts integrated with ReScript build, etc)

It could be something like an opam switch for ReScript.

[kaiuri]

from a user point of view, me, a solid package manager for rescript is the only thing missing for it to become to web development what rust is to backend development: a fast growing, highly ergonomic, addictive and fulfilling programming language.