Improve tree-shaking of external libraries

[filipsobol]

Issue

As described in #16395, we use a few external libraries that are not tree-shakeable. This unnecessarily increases the bundle size in projects that don't make use of them. This includes:

• ui — depends on color-convert and color-name, which are only needed with plugins using color picker.
• markdown-gfm — depends on marked and turndown, which are only needed when the Markdown plugin is used.
• real-time-collaboration — depends on socket.io, protobufjs, and many others, which are only needed when RTC features are used.

Our code in these packages is already fully tree-shakeable, but because these dependencies are not, they are kept in the bundle. The only way to prevent these dependencies from always being bundled that I'm aware of (except for replacing these libraries with others that are tree-shakeable) is to add sideEffects field to package.json files of our packages depending on these libraries.

The sideEffects field

The sideEffects field in a package.json file indicates whether the entire package or specific files within it have side effects when imported, which helps bundlers with tree-shaking to remove unused code more effectively.

Solution

If a file with side effects is not added to the sideEffects array, it may be tree-shaken away, causing issues or breaking the editor entirely. That is why I would avoid adding this field to all of our packages, but only as a last resort to these that have non-tree-shakeable external libraries. We also have to be careful to include in the array all the files that have side effects like:

• *.css files
• build/**/*.js files (build and translations)
• dist/translations/*.umd.js

The result

Adding these fields to ui, markdown-gfm, and real-time-collaboration reduces the bundle size by up to 140 KiB in Vite/Rollup and 130 KiB in esbuild. The following, darkened dependencies were removed from Rollup and esbuild builds with the following code:

import 'ckeditor5';
import 'ckeditor5-premium-features';

Testing

To make sure that this change doesn't introduce any regressions, we need to test all three packages mentioned above and see if they work properly in old and new installation methods. While unlikely, it's possible that too much code will be tree-shaken away, breaking these features or their styles.

[filipsobol]

The tests/**/*.js entry must also be added to the sideEffects array because otherwise webpack used in Karma is tree-shaking all the tests. Unfortunately, it's not possible to disable tree-shaking in this setup because the karma-webpack plugin always removes the optimization key from the configuration.

Update: This can be worked around using webpack plugin. See ckeditor/ckeditor5-dev#1060.

[filipsobol]

We've decided to implement this improvement in two steps. In the first step, we will add the sideEffects field to the markdown-gfm plugin and a new integration we will release soon. This allows us to test the waters on low-impact packages, before implementing the same in ui and real-time-collaboration packages.

[filipsobol]

The change in markdown-gfm is merged and will be released in the next release.

The same change in ui and real-time-collaboration is merged to feature branch scheduled for the end of Q1 2025.