4 ms·

> the whole CommonJs vs RequireJs vs AMD modules was really difficult to parse Oh man sounds like nothing changed. Now we have CJS and ESM still and Node doesn

by q-rews 5y ago

> the whole CommonJs vs RequireJs vs AMD modules was really difficult to parse Oh man sounds like nothing changed. Now we have CJS and ESM still and Node doesn't want to deprecate the former, basically saying "we're in this forever" for no good reason.

tnzm 5y ago
CommonJS is a great module system if you're using JS for scripting Unix (which it excels at). Is there a good reason to use ESM though? I've been half-joking that it's the "extinguish" phase of Microsoft's EEE strategy for JS. I know one legitimate reason is "tree shaking" (source-level LTO when bundling modules). Dumber, static import/export statements probably simplify that in some way. Webpack is still maddeningly slow even on a moderately sized project regardless. Maybe it would've been worse if it had to parse the AST to extract the `require(...)` calls. One change that ES modules introduced, I think, for no other reason than to be backwards incompatible, is changing the behavior of the default export (`export default foo` transpiles down to `module.exports.default = foo` instead of `module.exports = foo`). Other "ohai guys this is the new normal now" kinds of changes are making the dynamic imports async-only (after not supporting them for a while) as well as changing the behavior of module resolution. Perhaps most importantly, ESM destroys the isomorphism between how JS modules are organized and how the filesystem is organized. And the cherry on top is called TS-ESNode: https://github.com/K-FOSS/TS-ESNode https://github.com/K-FOSS/TS-ESNode because TypeScript modules and ESM are the same thing yet you need to somehow find this third-party shim which is required for them to work together at all. It's enabled by wrapping the interpreter, just like Yarn2's new dependency resolution.

4 ms·

> the whole CommonJs vs RequireJs vs AMD modules was really difficult to parse Oh man sounds like nothing changed. Now we have CJS and ESM still and Node doesn

by q-rews 5y ago

tnzm 5y ago
CommonJS is a great module system if you're using JS for scripting Unix (which it excels at). Is there a good reason to use ESM though? I've been half-joking that it's the "extinguish" phase of Microsoft's EEE strategy for JS. I know one legitimate reason is "tree shaking" (source-level LTO when bundling modules). Dumber, static import/export statements probably simplify that in some way. Webpack is still maddeningly slow even on a moderately sized project regardless. Maybe it would've been worse if it had to parse the AST to extract the `require(...)` calls. One change that ES modules introduced, I think, for no other reason than to be backwards incompatible, is changing the behavior of the default export (`export default foo` transpiles down to `module.exports.default = foo` instead of `module.exports = foo`). Other "ohai guys this is the new normal now" kinds of changes are making the dynamic imports async-only (after not supporting them for a while) as well as changing the behavior of module resolution. Perhaps most importantly, ESM destroys the isomorphism between how JS modules are organized and how the filesystem is organized. And the cherry on top is called TS-ESNode: https://github.com/K-FOSS/TS-ESNode https://github.com/K-FOSS/TS-ESNode because TypeScript modules and ESM are the same thing yet you need to somehow find this third-party shim which is required for them to work together at all. It's enabled by wrapping the interpreter, just like Yarn2's new dependency resolution.