VRP npm package

[do-me]

As in the title, it would be really cool if you could release the wasm build on npm so one can simply install it without having to build it yourself.
But no pressure, would be simply nice to have especially for quick demos.

[reinterpretcat]

Hi Dominik,

I've never released at npm anything, so it would require some digging how to do it automatically with github actions (after creating account). Also WASM version is single threaded and this is hardcoded at compilation level: AFAIR, when I worked on it around 6 years ago, multi-threading in WASM was an experimental feature for browsers. Using it would require users to set it explicitly in settings which was unnecessary complication for demoing it in the browser (primary goal of introduction). I haven't followed since, so I don't know whether this is still the case?.

However, I do publish docker image automatically for releases (based Musl, but with normal multi-threading support), have you considered to use docker for quick setup?

[do-me]

Hi Ilya,
thanks for your quick reply as always!
I think the formal release pipeline/CI for npm can simply be copied from other famous JS packages.
But I wasn't aware of all the additional complexity for multi-threading in wasm. Doing some quick research, it seems possible atm but not free of pitfalls; so I definitely understand your decision to just go single-threaded.

Just to give you an example of how I'm using vrp: In semantic-sorter I thought that I could combine your TSP solver with a distance matrix derived from text embeddings and it works fairly well. It's just a static Github page where I now need to include the wasm build in https://github.com/do-me/semantic-sorter/tree/main/src/vrp-pkg instead of being able to define it in the package.json. It works fine but installing it as npm package would be more elegant. Using docker in the github CI would be overkill for such a simple PoC.

[reinterpretcat]

I'm thinking to prepare a new release in the near feature (so far quite busy, have limited capacity), so this could be a perfect time to fix existing CI issues and add npm support.