After several weeks of carefully arranging ribbons, we pull the string
and end up with, ... a bit of a messy bow. There were still some things
I'd missed.
- Split the mod into a common (vanilla-only) project and Forge-specific
project. This gives us room to add Fabric support later on.
- Split the project into main/client source sets. This is not currently
statically checked: we'll do that soon.
- Rename block/item/tile entities to use suffixes rather than prefixes.
- Publish javadoc again: for now this is just the common-api
- Remove all dependencies from the published Forge jar. This is
technically not needed (fg.deobf does this anyway), but seems
sensible.
This adds two new modules: common-api and forge-api, which contain the
common and Forge-specific interfaces for CC's Minecraft-specific API.
We add a new PlatformHelper interface, which abstracts over some of the
loader-specific functionality, such as reading registries[^1] or calling
Forge-specific methods. This interface is then implemented in the main
mod, and loaded via ServiceLoaders.
Some other notes on this:
- We now split shared and client-specific source code into separate
modules. This is to make it harder to reference client code on the
server, thus crashing the game.
Eventually we'll split the main mod up too into separate source sets
- this is, of course, a much bigger problem!
- There's currently some nastiness here due to wanting to preserve
binary compatibility of the API. We'll hopefully be able to remove
this when 1.19.3 releases.
- In order to build a separate Forge-specific API jar, we compile the
common sources twice: once for the common jar and once for the Forge
jar.
Getting this to play nicely with IDEs is a little tricky and so we
provide a cct.inlineProject(...) helper to handle everything.
[^1]: We /can/ do this with vanilla's APIs, but it gives a lot of
deprecation warnings. It just ends up being nicer to abstract over it.
We'll do this everywhere eventually, but much easier to do it
incrementally:
- Use checker framework to default all field/methods/parameters to
@Nonnull.
- Start using ErrorProne[1] and NullAway[2] to check for possible null
pointer issues. I did look into using CheckerFramework, but it's much
stricter (i.e. it's actually Correct). This is technically good, but
is a much steeper migration path, which I'm not sure we're prepared
for yet!
[1]: https://github.com/google/error-prone
[2]: https://github.com/uber/NullAway
It should be possible to consume the ComputerCraft's core (i.e.
non-Minecraft code) in other projects, such as emulators. While this
has been possible for years, it's somewhat tricky from a maintenance
perspective - it's very easy to accidentally add an MC dependency
somewhere!
By publishing a separate "core" jar, we can better distinguish the
boundaries between our Lua runtime and the Minecraft-specific code.
Ideally we could have one core project (rather than separate core and
core-api modules), and publish a separate "api" jar, like we do for the
main mod. However, this isn't really possible to express using Maven
dependencies, and so we must resort to this system.
Of course, this is kinda what the Java module system is meant to solve,
but unfortunately getting that working with Minecraft is infeasible.
