feat: add print(...) function

[Rich-Harris]

Over on sveltejs/esrap#68 we're working on making esrap pluggable, so that it can be used to print any AST composed of { type: string, ... } nodes rather than just estree and its TypeScript extensions. That includes Svelte ASTs.

The main motivation for exposing this is so that we can make it easier to write preprocessors. Historically, Svelte exposed a preprocess API, but it's all strings and duct tape, and it's difficult to integrate preprocessors cleanly with bundlers as we've seen with enhanced-img.

When the preprocessor API was introduced, things looked very different. Preprocessing was necessary to support things like TypeScript and Sass. Today, TypeScript is supported natively, and CSS is sufficiently capable that Sass is little more than a historical curiosity.

In the long term, we'd therefore like to move away from the preprocessor API in favour of providing more robust lower-level utilities. For example enhanced-img, which can only be used in a Vite context, really should just be a Vite plugin:

import { parse, print } from 'svelte/compiler';
import { walk } from 'zimmerframe';

function transform(code) {
  const ast = parse(code);

  const transformed = walk(ast, null, {
    RegularElement(node, context) {
      if (node.name !== 'enhanced:img') return;
      // ...
    }
  });

  return print(ast);
}

There are other potential uses, such as migrations or sv add or having a 'format' button in the playground.

As a side-effect, quality of compiler output will be slightly better in certain cases, such as when encountering comments inside nodes. (Today, we attach leadingComments and trailingComments to each node, but this is a brittle and not-very-widely-used convention. The new esrap API expects an array of comments to be passed instead.)

This functionality already exists in svelte-ast-print (thank you @xeho91!), but having it in core means we can re-use the esrap version that's already installed alongside svelte, and will help ensure it stays current with new features.

Before submitting the PR, please make sure you do the following

• It's really useful if your PR references an issue where it is discussed ahead of time. In many cases, features are absent for a reason. For large changes, please create an RFC: https://github.com/sveltejs/rfcs
• Prefix your PR title with feat:, fix:, chore:, or docs:.
• This message body should clearly illustrate what problems it solves.
• Ideally, include a test that fails without this PR but passes with it.
• If this PR changes code within packages/svelte/src, add a changeset (npx changeset).

Tests and linting

• Run the tests with pnpm test and lint the project with pnpm lint

[changeset-bot]

⚠️ No Changeset found

Latest commit: 1377c40

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[svelte-docs-bot]

Preview: https://svelte-dev-git-preview-svelte-16188-svelte.vercel.app/

[xeho91]

Nice!

I'll be happy to sunset svelte-ast-print in favour of built-in into the core print() function. 👍
I'm glad the need for it finally reached this point. I'm swamped right now with my real-life stuff, but just in case, both @manuel3108 and @paoloricciuti have access to the svelte-ast-print repository in case I don't manage to announce it on time.

[manuel3108]

This already works super great.

I updated my pr for sv sveltejs/cli#568 to not only use parse but also print, and i basically didn't need to change anything in comparison to svelte-ast-print. I'm testing this with the paraglide addon, that is now printed nearly correctly, apart from the quoting issue mentioned below.

Apart from that we still need to figure out formatting, as the paraglide addon is currently printed in one line. This happens because I manually mutate the ast during the runtime and then print the ast.

I know all of this is in very early stages, but wanted to already leave some feedback

unwanted

[github-actions]

Playground

pnpm add https://pkg.pr.new/svelte@16188

[elliott-with-the-longest-name-on-github]

overall lgtm, but would be good to get a second pair of eyes...

[elliott-with-the-longest-name-on-github]

are we shipping this with a pkg.pr.new dep?

[Rich-Harris]

no, this PR is placeholder — it exists primarily to validate that the new esrap API makes sense

realized I approved instead of commenting; will re-review after it's out of draft