tsickle VS j2clmavenplugin

For (2), there is a tool called tsickle which converts some TypeScript code with definitions into Google Closure compatible code. When I tried this a few years ago, it still had some rough edges and there was some differences between the version of GCC that tsickle output for and the version that CLJS used.

Well, sounds nice, writing externs from scratch for such a huge project like three.js is an overwhelming task for one person. But there was a little problem: how to convert d.ts to externs? The good news: we can use Tsickle, the project aimed at generating externs from d.ts.

Initially J2CL was developed to be used in the Bazel environment. After several years of hard work the community, led by Colin Alworth, released the first public J2CL version for Maven – J2CL Maven plugin.

In the previous article I described how to create and run a simple Java application in a web browser using j2cl-maven-plugin, so if you aren’t familiar with J2CL or Google Closure Compiler I’d recommend taking a look at that article first.

Google loves Bazel (yeah, a monorepo, reproducible and stable builds and so on), we usually use Maven or Gradle for our projects. Luckily, we can try j2cl-maven-plugin that is developed by Colin Alworth from Vertispan, but for now let’s try the Bazel way.