Design Systems Team/Code splitting

This is a proposal for how to approach code splitting in Codex, and the impact that would have on the developer experience of using Codex in MediaWiki.

Current situation
Most features using Codex are encouraged to use the  ResourceLoader module. This module contains the entire Codex library, which is fairly large: 156 KB of JavaScript and CSS (transmitted over the network as 32.2 KB of compressed data); and this number will only grow as more components are added to Codex. Most features use only a subset of Codex components, so a substantial portion of this code is unused.

Some features use CSS-only components, and only load the  module, which contains the CSS without the JavaScript (68.8 KB of CSS, compressed to 9.6 KB). This module doesn't contain any JS, but it does contain the styles for all components in the library, including components that the feature might not use, and including styles that are only needed for the JS version of the components.

For the search feature in Vector, the Web team was very concerned about limiting the size of the code that is loaded, since the search feature appears on every page. To support this, the Design Systems Team created a special build of Codex, and made it available as the  and  modules in ResourceLoader. These modules only contain the TypeaheadSearch component and its dependencies. It's about half the size of the full library: the styles module is loaded at page load time and is 29.4 KB of CSS (4.5 KB compressed); the JS module is loaded when the user interacts with the feature, and is 36.7 KB of JS (12.6 KB compressed).

These search-specific modules ensure that no unused code is loaded for users who use the search feature. However, unused styles are still loaded for users who don't interact with the feature (because the  module contains styles for components that only appear after the user types something). This is also a one-off way of addressing the problem that requires special configuration in the Codex library and publishing a separate NPM package, which doesn't scale well if we want to provide this treatment for multiple features.

Another problem with these search-specific modules is that they duplicate part of the full Codex library. If both the search feature and another feature load on the same page, causing both  and   to be loaded, the search-specific components are loaded twice. Our current system is not smart enough to deduplicate this double-loading of components.

Proposal
Allow modules to list the Codex components they use

Embed those components with the module

Automatic deduplication through dependency relationships

Mention last: Change Codex build to produce many files, which require each other

Rejected alternatives
One module per component

More feature-specific builds within Codex

Build step in MediaWiki

Related efforts
Once the Vue 3 migration is completed and we can switch from the migration build of Vue to the regular build, this will reduce the size of Vue from ~57 KB compressed to ~50 KB compressed.

If we were able to use a build step to compile Vue templates to JavaScript (or at least do so in performance-sensitive places), we could load the runtime-only build of Vue. This would reduce the size of Vue further, from ~50 KB compressed to ~33.5 KB compressed.