Prevent optimisations of some parts

[YPetremann]

I'm working on a library for tic80,
I already have some part that are optimised the way I want
I would like to prevent pakettic to do further "destructive" optimisation to keep clarity even in the minified version.
It would be interesting to have a magic comment like --< and --> that would limit pakettic to be limited on whitespace optimisation
An extended version --<< and -->> would tell to even keep whitespace like it is
And finaly a --i"" would force to insert some content for release

An example:

--<
local TG={}
--i"\n"
function TG:BeginTabs(x,y,w,h)
-->
	line(x, y+8, x+w-1, y+8, self.theme.dark)
	return self:Element(true, x, y, w, h)
end
--i"\n"
--<
function TG:BeginTab(t,o,x,y,w,h)
-->
	if o==nil then o=self:state().open end
	o = self:Button(t, x,y, w,h) or o
	return self:Element(o, x,y, w,h)

end

For now it optimise as

local s={} s.BeginTabs=function(self,k,u,g,h)line(k,u+8,k+g-1,u+8,self.theme.dark)return self:Element(true,k,u,g,h)end  s.BeginTab=function(self,o,m,k,u,g,h)if nil==m then m=self:state().open end m=self:Button(o,k,u,g,h)or m return self:Element(m,k,u,g,h)end 

I would prefer that it does that

local TG={}
function TG:BeginTabs(x,y,w,h)line(x,y+8,x+w-1,y+8,self.theme.dark)return self:Element(true,x,y,w,h)end
function TG:BeginTab(t,o,x,y,w,h)if nil==o then o=self:state().open end o=self:Button(t,x,y,w,h)or o return self:Element(o,x,y,w,h)end

[vsariola]

Similar to #15, maybe this motivates me to actually implement some parts of this. Though your use case of optimizing libraries ain't exactly the targeted use case of pakettic. Pakettic was designed to optimize extreme sizecoding, not caring about readability.

[YPetremann]

Yeah, and I like that my lib can be extremely optimized, but here it has some drawback:

• s.BeginTabs=function(self,k,u,g,h) take more place than function TG:BeginTabs(x,y,w,h),
• I already use one char arguments, I don't see a reason to have them randomly mangled as I can manualy unmangle them sucessfully for the same size after optimisation.
• A final point is that in my library, each line is a "module" that can be removed if unused, so those who would use the lib could easily remove them and save space, the reason to have a way to insert a newline char (or it can be to insert something that we know would make it working for production) quite the inverse of --![

[vsariola]

But just to make sure: you are not concerned about compressed size of the cart, but rather the uncompressed lua code size (char count)? So, wouldn't any LUA minifier do the job?

The conversion of the : method syntax into longer form is just an oversight; : is normally just syntactic sugar for what pakettic shows. I just figured we better undo syntactic sugars for the duration of optimization so the AST is simpler and then redo them when printing out the code when we see opportunity for it. What is now missing is the last part. And it is missing because methods are never used in extreme sizecoding. This can definitely be remedied.

Turning off expression juggling for entire branches of the AST sounds easy to do also and could be necessary in some rare cases in sizecoding too (ref. #15

But the last one (turning off mangling of specific identifiers) is a bit more tricky. Atm we never track scope (if variable foo is renamed bar, every foo named variable in the entire code gets renamed bar) so the easiest way would be just adding your not-to-be-renamed parameter names to the list of reserved names. But I'm not sure this is would be ok for you.

[YPetremann]

But just to make sure: you are not concerned about compressed size of the cart, but rather the uncompressed lua code size (char count)? So, wouldn't any LUA minifier do the job ?

For now I tested luamin that break my code (tic80 don't even throw an error but became unresponsive) and lua-minify that too broke my code (throw an error, hard to test), but yours work

But the last one (turning off mangling of specific identifiers) is a bit more tricky. Atm we never track scope (if variable foo is renamed bar, every foo named variable in the entire code gets renamed bar) so the easiest way would be just adding your not-to-be-renamed parameter names to the list of reserved names. But I'm not sure this is would be ok for you.

I think that can do the job of keeping the library name and method parameters.
After that it' easy for me to make a script that would replace function TG: by \nfunction TG:

[vsariola]

For now I tested luamin that break my code (tic80 don't even throw an error but became unresponsive) and lua-minify that too broke my code (throw an error, hard to test), but yours work

Interesting, perhaps because of mangling TIC-80 specific global function names. But nice to hear that pakettic seems to be doing something right.

I think that can do the job of keeping the library name and method parameters. After that it' easy for me to make a script that would replace function TG: by \nfunction TG:

I'll see what I can do.