Add Parcel 1 plugin

[steeltomato]

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• I agree to follow the code of conduct that this project follows, as appropriate.
• I have searched the issue tracker for an issue that matches the one I want to file, without success.

Please describe your issue:

Tracking issue for completing the Parcel plugin for Forge 6.x

This description will be updated with a checklist tracking the work remaining and known issues.

[steeltomato]

@MarshallOfSound, I've looked through your work in the parcel branch. Could you comment here about what work remains, the issues you encountered and specifically what functionality was lacking in Parcel 1.x? I'd really like to see Parcel+HMR working and have some bandwidth to take care of it.

[ghost]

@steeltomato : the docs here https://v6.electronforge.io/plugins/parcel say:

The Parcel plugin will be released when Parcel 2.0 is complete due to several missing capabilities specific to Electron in Parcel 1.0

[malept]

I talked to @MarshallOfSound about this a while ago, and he stopped working on the branch for a couple of reasons:

• The API was difficult to use. For example, you couldn't give it a custom logger, everything used console.log
• The architecture makes it difficult to run multiple instances of Parcel per-process, unlike Webpack

The Parcel authors are aware of these limitations and are planning to fix them in v2:

• [RFC] Parcel 2: Better Electron support parcel-bundler/parcel#2492
• [RFC] Parcel 2: Programmatic API parcel-bundler/parcel#2574

However, that doesn't mean that we wouldn't review a pull request to add a Parcel v1 plugin! It would be helpful if we talked about the design here first, though. Ideally, it would operate in a similar manner to the Webpack plugin.

For what it's worth, Electron Fiddle is built with Forge v6 and Parcel v1, although there was a fair amount of custom code needed (see the tools/parcel*.js files).

[steeltomato]

Thanks Mark! Trying to build off the Fiddle app is what brought me to this point. As far as I can tell, that app doesn't attempt any dev-mode support for HMR or even a basic reload on changes.

Your notes and the linked issues give me all the information I was looking for. Parcel 2 seems pretty far off from what I see on their roadmap. It may be worthwhile to build the plugin if there's a way to work around these issues.