On 29 April 2013 16:24, Domenic Denicola <[email protected]> wrote: > While this is starting to make a lot of sense to me, especially the > package-vs.-module concerns, I worry about trying to get it in ES6. Also, as > someone with an ES5 background, I don't see the value of lexically-named > modules, and so am happy to postpone them to ES7. > > Taken together, I think the minimal solution would be to remove explicit > module declaration entirely: that is, ES6 would just have `import`/`export`, > without any `module`. > > But this leaves the question of how to support the concatenative use case if > we don't have the ability to declare multiple modules in the same file. This > brings to mind two approaches: > > 1. Does SPDY alone solve the problem concatenation is meant to solve? I don't > know very much about SPDY but it's reasonable to assume browsers that support > ES6 modules will support SPDY, given current trends, and I know it makes some > vague moves in this direction. > > 2. Can the loader API be used instead? E.g. instead of the concatenated file > being > > ```js > module "foo" { ... } > > module "bar" { ... } > ``` > > it could instead be > > ```js > System.set("npm:foo", `...`); > System.set("npm:bar", `...`); > ```
I brought up this very suggestion as a "min-max" sort of compromise at the March meeting, but it did not get much love. And I agree that it isn't pretty, although it actually has some technical advantages, e.g. enabling parallel parsing. As for a SPDY-like mechanism, I absolutely believe that something along these lines is the way to go, for two reasons: 1. My prediction is that in the mid-term future, concatenation will actually become harmful to performance when the sources are already in the browser cache, because it prevents a lot of parallelisation, caching and/or work deferring that would otherwise be possible in the VM. 2. The bundling and transmission issue is a problem far beyond JS files, and needs to be solved on a more general level. Large web applications like Gmail currently go to great length to optimize it manually, across file types, and I believe that a purely JS modules focused approach to bundling will not help them a iota, whatever we do. /Andreas _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
