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Comment by hollowturtle | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one believing common js was super ok and don't like esm? Or put differently I didn't see the necessity of having esm at all in Node. Let alone the browser, imagine loading tons of modules over the wire instead of bundle them

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The fact that ESM exports are static - and imports are mostly static - allows for a lot more dead code removal during bundling. That alone is a big win IMHO.

You can still bundle them, maybe you even should. Webpack still does a good job. Can also remove unused parts.

If anything bun proves that both worlds can go together despite what proponents of web standards says

> If anything bun proves that both worlds can go together despite what proponents of web standards says

Sure, but Bun's implementation is a confusing mess a lot of times. I prefer them separate.

Note: This is no shade toward Bun. I'm a fan of Bun and the innovative spirit of the team behind it.

Yes.

Also CommonJS does not support tree shaking.

Nor does ESM if you import * as. Plus I believe it can be made to support tree shaking

Edit: the proof my point reside in the many libraries which have an open issue because, even if ESM, they don't support tree shaking

`import * as` is still treeshakeable and Browsers will do it in-memory as the imports form weak proxies.

Bundlers can treeshake it, it is just harder to do, and so it hasn't always been a priority feature. esbuild especially in the last few years has done a lot of work to treeshake `import * as` in many more scenarios than before. Sure it isn't treeshaking "all" scenarios yet, but it's still getting better.

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