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.
This offers very few advantages now, but helps support the following in
the future:
- Reuse test support code across multiple projects (useful for
multi-loader).
- Allow using test fixture code in testMod. We've got a version of our
gametest which use Kotlin instead of Lua for asserting computer
behaviour.
We can't use java-test-fixtures here for Forge reasons, so have to roll
our own version. Alas.
- Add an ILuaMachine implementation which runs Kotlin coroutines
instead. We can use this for testing asynchronous APIs. This also
replaces the FakeComputerManager.
- Move most things in the .support module to .test.core. We need to use
a separate package in order to cope with Java 9 modules (again,
thanks Forge).
Look, I don't enjoy having 600 LOC long build.gradle files, it's just
very easy to do! This at least moves some of the complexity elsewhere,
so the build script is a little more declarative.
It's more verbose as the default license plugin doesn't support multiple
license headers. However, it also gives us some other goodies (namely
formatting Kotlin and removing unused imports), so worth doing.
