With 2022 being a control system update, at WPILib we’re planning to use this to make some long needed improvements, and I’m focusing on the build system side of all of this.
We will be keeping VS Code and Gradle for 2022. Improved simulation support on both ends is the biggest improvement being made that will be visible to users. However, in the backend, all the deploy functionality is getting improved as well, and getting a complete rewrite as we’re moving all the plugin code from being groovy based to being Java based. Some of these changes do slightly change how the build scripts are set up (they’re a lot easier to understand now), but this gives us the best time to bring in new features.
Because of this, are there any changes users would like to see to either the VS Code side or the Gradle side for improving their experiences? Now’s the time to do them, as everyone has spent a few years with the current setup. Just post your comments here and I’ll look into them.
We already have a few that are being planned.
- Better Docs
- Better simulation support (support release mode, support default and non default enabled extensions, show names instead of library names in vscode)
- Tasks to read files off of the roborio during deploy
- Stages for deploy, to enable manipulating the deploy pipeline much easier