As someone that has used module systems from dojo to CommonsJS to AMD to ESM with webpack and esbuild and rollup and a few others thrown in ... this statement hits hard.
There are many libraries that have switched to esm only (meaning they don't support commonjs), but even today, the best way to find the last commonjs version of those libraries is to go to the "versions" tab on npm, and find the most downloaded version in the last month, and chances are, that will be the last commonjs version.
Yes, in a vacuum, esm is objectively a better than commonjs, but how tc39 almost intentionally made it incompatible with commonjs (via top-level awaits) is just bizarre to me.
Given that, top-level await is a sensible affordance, which you’d have to go out of your way to block because async modules already have the same semantics.
Recently, Node has compromised by allowing ESM to be loaded synchronously absent TLA, but that’s only feasible because Node is loading those models from the file system, rather than any network-accessible location (and because it already has those semantics for CJS). That compromise makes sense locally, too. But it still doesn’t make sense in a browser.
But also, there's a special place in hell for the people that decided to add default exports, "export * from" and top level await.
Commonjs is also very weird as a "module" instance can be reassigned to a reference of another module
module.exports = require('./foo')
and there's no way to do this in ESM (for good reason, but also no one warned us). In fact major projects like React use CJS exports and the entire project cannot be optimized by bundlers. So, rather than porting to ESM, they created a compiler LOL
There is also a special place in extra-hell for those who export a function named 'then'.
I haven't thought about that in years. I didn't realize it had been solved.
Browser support looks pretty good.
I guess now I have to figure out how to get this to play nice with Vite and TypeScript module resolution.... and now it's starting to hurt my brain again, great.
I'm convinced that 90% of the JavaScript ecosystem only exists to build tools for itself. It's tools all the way down
Bun has replaced a massive number of tools and dependencies from our stack and really counteracted the tooling explosion that we were forced into with node.
Exactly, bun is killer. The test runner is extremely fast.
I can build apps with 1-5 total dependencies and everything just works, and works incredibly fast.
Isn't this more-or-less a self-inflected wound? Who forced you into working with node?
Attempting to replicate even a modicum of this in lower-level languages can be a real struggle. Rust is definitively the least-worst in this respect because there's been a concerted effort by the community to provide stable packages that do most things. But Rust is a complicated and unapproachable language. Using other low-level languages like C/Zig, and you immediately run into issues of libraries and static linking. And even if you find a library, its documentation is either lacklustre or outright missing (looking at you libuv and libxev respectively).
The amount of manual setup and third-party builds-system finagling just to: 1) run a TCP server; 2) fetch data over HTTP; 3) do both of these using a single event loop (no separate threads); 4) use SQLite for storage; and 5) have all this produce a single self-contained executable. Yet I cannot understate how trivial this is with Bun.