Production Builds MVP

[wycats]

We should make it easy to strip out runtime behavior that is only there for debug purposes.

Things to do:

• Integrate the import.meta.env Vite de facto standard
• Use conditionals to remove as much behavior as possible
• Ship a debug entry point with debug features in and a prod entry point with debug features out
• Figure out and document how to automate the use of the correct entry point in popular bundlers
• Figure out how to make loose modules "just work" with downstream Vite users

Out of scope for this issue:

• Figure out how to minimize the code size of unused production features.

This is important, but it's a little trickier, because it involves things like stripping out unused methods, which has implications for TypeScript. My preferred solution is to use build-time decorators with import.meta.env to remove unused behavior.

• Transform the verify pattern (verify(expr, isPresent)) to remove the call to verify entirely.

This is very important, but requires a different kind of work than the primary work this ticket is about.

Both of these are important near-term follow-up issues.

[NullVoxPopuli]

Here is a PR that tries to use what's on main: NullVoxPopuli/latency-tester#9

We can use this to test out production mode:

At the time of writing, we still have:

• inspect-utils
• stacktracey
• some lingering import.meta.env.DEV
• nydus?
  

[wycats]

Closing this out as the effort to identify a solid production build strategy is now happening in https://github.com/starbeamjs/starbeam-lite. That repo is a testbed for addressing some of the long-standing open questions in the Starbeam fundamentals. Once we get to the end of that exploration, this repo will and starbeam-lite will be merged.