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When I try and check out their new page linked from here, I'm getting a certificate error. It looks like it's only issued for Netlify subdomains. Minor, but kin

When I try and check out their new page linked from here, I'm getting a certificate error. It looks like it's only issued for Netlify subdomains. Minor, but kinda annoying. One question I have about Rome is why it tries to take on the testing framework too. I really like the idea of it having all the build tooling together, but testing seems like a sort of separate thing. Other environments I've used let libraries fill the gaps for testing, including JS. Is there a big advantage to pulling it into Rome?

ketzo 6y ago
I guess the argument is that testing is very often another piece of the "developer experience" of a project, akin to linting or compilation. It makes some amount of sense to me, although I see where you're coming from.
- pseudoramble 6y ago
  Right. I'm genuinely not trying to make a judgement on the choice - it's just not the choice I'm used to seeing, including in JS environments. So it seems like there must be some reasoning behind it. I suppose that's true! Practically speaking, it would be nice to have one testing framework to learn and use over-and-over again, but that's also kinda counter to what I'm used to in the JS world.
acemarke 6y ago
If you look at configuring a tool like Jest, there's a ton of "build tool" overlap, typically involving configuring Babel/TypeScript, parsing, path aliases, and so on. In particular, you usually have duplicate configuration for Jest and Webpack for all those things, but with completely different config file formats. Test runners also need to be able to iterate over files, run checks, and print diagnostics. Those all sound like things that Rome has the ability to do already, _and_ it's another tool that Rome could eliminate from a typical install. I'm not planning to switch to Rome any time soon, but I definitely understand the mindset involved in that approach.
- Touche 6y ago
  This is a weird peculiarity of the JS ecosystem. The rest of programming ecosystems do not have dozens of tools all doing a build for you. When you run tests in C you do not use a special cli testing tool that also compiles your project... You just run cc on your test files and run it like everything else. Why JS prefers hiding the build I'll never understand.
  - acemarke 6y ago
    Not sure I agree with that statement. For example, I know that nUnit and jUnit are test runners for the .NET and Java ecosystems, and both of those are also runnable via the CLI. As for the JS ecosystem, it's definitely developed differently than other languages, because it deals with a very different set of constraints. See this article for background explanation (which also links to further reading) https://www.swyx.io/jobs-of-js-build-tools/ https://www.swyx.io/jobs-of-js-build-tools/
    - swyx 6y ago
      ayy tx for shoutout
  - ratww 6y ago
    Not really: dynamic languages (Python, Ruby, PHP) also have special cli testing tools just like JS, and that's where JS got inspiration from. What makes JS different is that it started having a compilation phase along the way, so both approaches hat to be combined.
  - Macha 6y ago
    You absolutely have this in the Java ecosystem also. Maven or Gradle + IDE plugins that need to be configured for most projects. Python too, it's lessened by the fact that you can usually skips the build test, but there's often tox, pytest, setup.py, and coverage.py configuration in even simple projects.
- pseudoramble 6y ago
  That's a good point, and one that I've forgotten since I've been out of the JS world for a while now! Often you're trying to run the code in different environments depending on the context, which does require a lot of extra build tool support. Consolidating that is a reasonable goal, I'd say. It will be neat to see where they draw the line. For example, will Rome include an assertion library? What about mock and fake support? That feels a bit far from what Rome is trying to do, but if they've implemented a test runner, maybe defaults provided would be good for the DX?

ketzo 6y ago

I guess the argument is that testing is very often another piece of the "developer experience" of a project, akin to linting or compilation. It makes some amount of sense to me, although I see where you're coming from.

pseudoramble 6y ago
Right. I'm genuinely not trying to make a judgement on the choice - it's just not the choice I'm used to seeing, including in JS environments. So it seems like there must be some reasoning behind it. I suppose that's true! Practically speaking, it would be nice to have one testing framework to learn and use over-and-over again, but that's also kinda counter to what I'm used to in the JS world.

acemarke 6y ago

If you look at configuring a tool like Jest, there's a ton of "build tool" overlap, typically involving configuring Babel/TypeScript, parsing, path aliases, and so on. In particular, you usually have duplicate configuration for Jest and Webpack for all those things, but with completely different config file formats. Test runners also need to be able to iterate over files, run checks, and print diagnostics. Those all sound like things that Rome has the ability to do already, _and_ it's another tool that Rome could eliminate from a typical install. I'm not planning to switch to Rome any time soon, but I definitely understand the mindset involved in that approach.

Touche 6y ago
This is a weird peculiarity of the JS ecosystem. The rest of programming ecosystems do not have dozens of tools all doing a build for you. When you run tests in C you do not use a special cli testing tool that also compiles your project... You just run cc on your test files and run it like everything else. Why JS prefers hiding the build I'll never understand.
- acemarke 6y ago
  Not sure I agree with that statement. For example, I know that nUnit and jUnit are test runners for the .NET and Java ecosystems, and both of those are also runnable via the CLI. As for the JS ecosystem, it's definitely developed differently than other languages, because it deals with a very different set of constraints. See this article for background explanation (which also links to further reading) https://www.swyx.io/jobs-of-js-build-tools/ https://www.swyx.io/jobs-of-js-build-tools/
  - swyx 6y ago
    ayy tx for shoutout
- ratww 6y ago
  Not really: dynamic languages (Python, Ruby, PHP) also have special cli testing tools just like JS, and that's where JS got inspiration from. What makes JS different is that it started having a compilation phase along the way, so both approaches hat to be combined.
- Macha 6y ago
  You absolutely have this in the Java ecosystem also. Maven or Gradle + IDE plugins that need to be configured for most projects. Python too, it's lessened by the fact that you can usually skips the build test, but there's often tox, pytest, setup.py, and coverage.py configuration in even simple projects.
pseudoramble 6y ago
That's a good point, and one that I've forgotten since I've been out of the JS world for a while now! Often you're trying to run the code in different environments depending on the context, which does require a lot of extra build tool support. Consolidating that is a reasonable goal, I'd say. It will be neat to see where they draw the line. For example, will Rome include an assertion library? What about mock and fake support? That feels a bit far from what Rome is trying to do, but if they've implemented a test runner, maybe defaults provided would be good for the DX?