Moving to a Modern Build System

[saivan]

I think it makes sense to spend some time migrating asciimath's core functionality to a modern and more modular build system. I was thinking something like rollup. I find myself often requiring only a subset of asciimath's core functionality, and it would be super cool to be able to include only that functionality when I need it.

For example, I recently needed to convert asciimath markup to latex, which requires finding the right file (which has a large amount of duplicated code), and then using that file. It would be great to modularise this codebase for two main reasons:

1. It makes it much less intimidating to new contributors who might like to use it
2. It makes the intent of different code sections clearer
3. It makes it easier to integrate asciimath into your workflow

Any thoughts?

[drlippman]

I personally find build systems annoying, but I'm not totally unopposed so long as a compiled version of the script remains in the repo as well.

[saivan]

Yep, I agree that a dist folder would be necessary. I'm really only advocating for a refactor. It would make using asciimath easier if you only need some of the functionality. It also eliminates the code duplication that we have across the multiple files.