Update to Chokidar v3

[paulmillr]

Hey! I wonder which steps would it take to:

1. Update to chokidar v3
2. Drop vscode-chokidar and vscode-fsevents packages.

Chokidar v3 incorporates a lot of improvements. We've decreased RAM consumption on large directories by a huge amount; and reduced dependency count by a factor of 13. All releases are signed now. See my blog post: Chokidar 3: How to save 32TB of traffic every week with one NPM package

Chokidar v3 requires nodejs 8 and higher. Unsure if that's good with vscode?

BTW, i'm keeping an eye on the Linux issue Ben mentioned.

cc @bpasero

[bpasero]

Hi @paulmillr, yes we totally want to update and drop our custom forks.

I do not think there is something blocking for us to move to version 3. However, one thing I was hoping gets resolved, still seems to be an issue: paulmillr/chokidar#860 (and the predecessor paulmillr/chokidar#447).

Any thoughts? This is the cause of one of our most upvoted watcher issues: #3998

PS: nice blog post, and great outcome 👍

[paulmillr]

For mac, I think the issue has been resolved if a user has fsevents.

For linux, i’ll dive into it.

[bpasero]

@paulmillr I tested specifically on macOS (version 3.0), were there any changes that came in recently that could have an impact? Maybe you check both OS. This would also be a concern for Windows: up until today we use our own custom file watcher on Windows (C# based), but we would eventually want to change to a single solution.

[paulmillr]

@bpasero check out the chokidar v2 vs v3 benchmarks — there were definitely some massive improvements across all platforms.

[ashthespy]

paulmillr/readdirp#99 (comment) is a possible blocker for this, as VS Code also runs on node v10.11.0 currently.

[paulmillr]

Bigints are supported since 10.2 or so, I don't think this is a root cause of the issue.

[ashthespy]

Cross linking - electron/electron#15323 is the actual blocker.

[bpasero]

@ashthespy your comment in paulmillr/readdirp#99 (comment) seems to suggest that this is fixed in Electron 4? VSCode is using Electron 4 since 2 months.

[ashthespy]

@ashthespy your comment in paulmillr/readdirp#99 (comment) seems to suggest that this is fixed in Electron 4? VSCode is using Electron 4 since 2 months.

Initially paulmillr/readdirp#99 (comment) seemed to suggest that it was a Node v10 vs v12 issue, but we did indeed figure out it's an electron issue.
So this isn't a blocker any more!

[paulmillr]

readdirp-3.1.2 is out with the fix for Electron.