In modern ES code, I love the named imports & exports since it allows us
to only import what we need. Tooling has jumped on this as well by
stripping out any exports that aren't used (treeshaking).
However, a big downside of named imports is that you lose any
"namespacing", which is especially relevant for generic
function/variable names. For example, `lodash` and `async` both export a
`map` function, and it isn't unlikely to use both packages in a single
project, or even a single module. This gives naming conflicts.
We currently have 2 options to resolve these conflicts:
- Alias individual imports:
import { map as lodashMap } from 'lodash';
import { map as asyncMap } from 'async';
- Replace with * import
import * as _ from 'lodash';
import * as async from 'async';
Neither option is ideal:
- Aliasing results in either inconsistent code (some imports are
prefixed, others aren't) or "smurfnaming". Prefixing is often also less
readable than namespacing, especially for longer names
(`lodashLastIndexOf` vs `lodash.lastIndexOf`).
- Star imports prevent treeshaking.
The solution to this seems simple enough: allow a group of named imports
to be aliased as a whole:
import { map } as _ from 'lodash';
_.map();
This preserves both "namespacing" and selective importing, giving the
best of both worlds.
To me this seems like such a no-brainer that I'm actually surprised that
this isn't possible already. Has something like this been considered at
some point? And what would be the downsides of this? Or is there just
too little interest in this?
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