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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a bad idea to support both. Encourages bad behavior and half-ass code. I've had no problem moving codebases to es6 without a ton of effort.

Maybe at most, hide the capability behind an execution flag.

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You may not be aware that node created a situation where ESM maximizes compatibility when consuming libraries and CJS maximizes compatibility when producing libraries. Its a circular incentive paradigm. I suspect you are consuming libraries using "import" and everything "just works". Well, under the hood you are likely importing many libraries that use CJS "module.exports" because that is what libraries use to ensure their library can be used with both import/ESM AND require/CJS.

The only solution to this problem is to upgrade require work for importing ESM. Once that is implemented ESM will become the natural choice for those publishing libraries. Until that happens library authors are going to continue to use CJS so their libraries are available to everyone.

The last version of Node that only supported CJS libraries has already long faded out of LTS. In my opinion, more libraries should just rip the band-aid off and entirely stop publishing CJS. Sure that will upset some downstream dependencies, but semver major tag it, and many of the downstream dependencies need the kick in the pants to move to ESM anyway.

Node.js v12 doesn't have proper ESM support and went out of LTS < 6 months ago. Have some patience!

Node 12 went out of LTS 16 months ago. 4 months ago was Node 14

Also, Node 12 supported ESM somewhat fine, you just had to use the --experimental-modules flag for Node. If you still have to support Node 12 in 2023 for some odd reason, you probably shouldn't have a problem enabling an experimental flag to support more modern libraries.

Node 10 was truly the last LTS that had zero ESM support, and that support ended 2 and a half years ago.

The problem isn't your code. It's the dependencies of your dependencies.

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