Node Modules at War: Why CommonJS and ES Modules Can’t Get Along

A major benefit of node modules using ESM, at the moment, is that they aren’t swimming in a swamp of NPM packages.

In two-and-a-half months the last 5 stable releases on Node, the last 2 LTS releases of Node, and all current major browsers will support standard JS modules.

It's time we all published standard JS modules and only standard JS modules to npm.

> the last 2 LTS releases of Node

(Author here.)

Node 14 supports ESM, but Node 12 only supports ESM behind the --experimental-modules flag, and its error handling for incorrectly importing CJS is not good.

In 2020, I think it's a bit early to go ESM only, especially since it's straightforward for CJS libraries to support both CJS and ESM clients. (I document how to do this in the article.)

Enough with the hornet hate. They are great animals. If you know German, you can learn how great they are in the knowledge podcast of the Bavarian Broadcast: https://www.br.de/mediathek/podcast/radiowissen/die-wespe-un...

Or if you prefer this Hessian article:

https://www.faz.net/podcasts/wie-erklaere-ich-s-meinem-kind/...

JavaScript just gives to much options. I keep having problems with libraries because ES6 allows

  import x from "library";
  import {x} from "library";
  import * as x from "library";
  import {x as y} from "library";

Just to compare Java uses this:

  import java.lang.Double;
  import java.lang.*;

No renaming, not a gazillion options during in- and export, but one statement. If you want to rename something, assign it to a variable.

I don't understand why ES-module authors made it that complicated, when they had the chance to introduce a proper module system.

Why did they not just copy Java's system and be done with it.