Is your time (and/or response) typically limited to patreons?
No, not at all. But the "Place for Patreon Patrons" part of the forum is meant to be - generally I try and respond first and give a bit more time to those that have decided to try and support Espruino through Patreon... Same applies to the WiFi boards you bought though - I try and give you much better support than I would give to someone who bought a $4 ESP8266 from China, installed Espruino on it and started asking a bunch of questions :)
I'll move your post out - can you try and post in maybe the JavaScript part of the forum if you have questions like this one in the future?
minification is pretty important with the MCU's limited resources?
It depends, if you write reasonably compact code with the suggestions at http://www.espruino.com/Performance it may not be too bad. Minification is rubbish for debugging, and if you're writing all your logic in modules then you may care about having it off at least during development.
In looking at the minification options, I see that you have two options (Esprima and Closure). Have you considered babel?
There is some work going on at the moment looking at using rollup and terser. Trying to make heavyweight Node.js tools run inside a web browser can be particularly difficult though.
But see below - if you have some favorite tools, just use those.
I am considering researching/using your espruino npm package for deployment, and bypassing the IDE.
It's basically the same underlying set of tools, but in a CLI.
It sounds like what you may want to do is write a little script which:
Write your code
Use rollup/some kind of tree-shaking to combine everything into one file
Minify it with an ES6 compatible minifier
Write that with the CLI. It has a -w option to watch a file for changes while displaying the REPL, so it plays well with external tools.
Rather than trying to reimplement some Espruino-specific set of tools, it feels like you're probably used to working a certain way - so I'd just do that and write the final file with the CLI tools.
Espruino is a JavaScript interpreter for low-power Microcontrollers. This site is both a support community for Espruino and a place to share what you are working on.
No, not at all. But the "Place for Patreon Patrons" part of the forum is meant to be - generally I try and respond first and give a bit more time to those that have decided to try and support Espruino through Patreon... Same applies to the WiFi boards you bought though - I try and give you much better support than I would give to someone who bought a $4 ESP8266 from China, installed Espruino on it and started asking a bunch of questions :)
I'll move your post out - can you try and post in maybe the JavaScript part of the forum if you have questions like this one in the future?
It depends, if you write reasonably compact code with the suggestions at http://www.espruino.com/Performance it may not be too bad. Minification is rubbish for debugging, and if you're writing all your logic in modules then you may care about having it off at least during development.
There is some work going on at the moment looking at using rollup and terser. Trying to make heavyweight Node.js tools run inside a web browser can be particularly difficult though.
But see below - if you have some favorite tools, just use those.
It's basically the same underlying set of tools, but in a CLI.
It sounds like what you may want to do is write a little script which:
-w
option to watch a file for changes while displaying the REPL, so it plays well with external tools.Rather than trying to reimplement some Espruino-specific set of tools, it feels like you're probably used to working a certain way - so I'd just do that and write the final file with the CLI tools.