Improve sheets building process

[exerro]

The current way sheets builds is... horrible. Ideally, the final version would output a single file with everything localised, and a lookup table for file lines that's used by the Exception class to correctly determine line numbers and source files.

The preprocessor could be used to make @class XYZ turn into local XYZ = class "XYZ", and localise all classes at the top of the build.

[exerro]

Line-preserving minification would be very good too.

[CrazedProgrammer]

You could do LZW-compression and base92 packing like carl

[exerro]

Wouldn't it then need to ship with a decompresser? Seems a little too complicated tbh. Also why thte base92 packing?

[CrazedProgrammer]

Yes it ships with a ~1kb decompresser, it uses base92 packing because you need to inline it in a lua string.

[exerro]

Seems somewhat verbose. Maybe in a later version. Also rip program startup time.

[CrazedProgrammer]

It's actually not noticeable.
It takes less than 1/10th of a second to decompress Surface 2 from 27kB to 39kB.

[exerro]

Sheets is ~120kb without surface, ~160kb with surface, and will probably be more like 200kb in total by the time v0.0.4 is released. Assuming it takes 5x longer (as it's 5x the uncompressed size), that's half a second of delay. It's not much, sure, but still a pain. Half a second is actually really noticeable.

[CrazedProgrammer]

Yeah you have a point.

[exerro]

The new build system implemented in 324eab0 changed how classes work, most importantly the fact that they are all now locals rather than in a sandboxed environment. This means code generation that relied on accessing these classes now fails as those classes aren't in the environment passed to them. While a patch has been applied (see Codegen.lua), there might still be issues. It needs to be reviewed.