Lazy load chokidar dependency

[eklingen]

Is it possible to make dart-sass load chokidar only when actually watching files?

In trying to optimise my build chain, I've noticed dart-sass loads the chokidar dependency, even when the watch functionality isn't actually used. While the absolute timings are small (though depending on cpu, I/O, etc), chokidar is relatively heavy, since it accounts for ~75% of the time it takes to load dart-sass. At least, in my tests.

   55 ms        │   ├─ node_modules/sass/sass.dart.js (2x)
   43 ms        │   │   └─ node_modules/chokidar/index.js (10x)
    4 ms        │   │       ├─ node_modules/readdirp/index.js (2x)
    4 ms        │   │       │   └─ node_modules/picomatch/index.js
   18 ms        │   │       ├─ node_modules/chokidar/node_modules/braces/index.js (4x)
    4 ms        │   │       │   └─ node_modules/chokidar/node_modules/braces/lib/compile.js (2x)
    9 ms        │   │       └─ node_modules/chokidar/lib/fsevents-handler.js (2x)
    8 ms        │   │           └─ node_modules/fsevents/fsevents.js

I'm not that well versed in Dart. But i'm willing to take a crack at it.

[nex3]

My understanding is that lazy-loading dependencies works poorly with WebPack's bundling (https://github.com/sass/dart-sass/issues/726). If we can find a way to resolve these two issues, I'm open to lazily loading Chokidar again.

[DRoet]

Might be worth upgrading to chokidar 3.x since it is about an 17x package & deps size reduction compared to 2.x. so it might load faster

[tchetwin]

Looks like support for 3.x has been in place since https://github.com/sass/dart-sass/pull/731, corresponding I think to version v1.22.1:

https://github.com/sass/dart-sass/blob/d155f3518e92a1b41122f0f2e3b22572329c35c6/package/package.json#L19-L21

[dl748]

I don't think its being honored then, because it only installs the latest version of 2... 2.1.8......

Fresh install shows

├─┬ [email protected]
│ └─┬ [email protected]

changing the package.json of sass to ">=3.0.0 <4.0.0" correctly installs the latest version

I'm getting problems on Mac's because its the only dependency that installs fsevents version 1, and it doesn't work with NodeJS 14.

[silviuburceadev]

As Node.js 14 is already in LTS mode and chokidar 2.x breaks on Node 14, I think it's time for chokidar 3.x. This actually prevents me to upgrade to Node 14 for my apps.