System.import()?

[Jason Orendorff]

On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 9:50 PM, Bradley Meck <bradley.meck at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think we all want to find a good solution to creating a Loader for ES6
> modules. I would follow WHATWG's Loader if you want to participate. There
> are a surprising number of considerations, particularly due to existing code
> bases.

I'm aware of the considerations. I helped Dave Herman hash out the
Loader design.

The opportunity here is that we can specify System.import() now
*without* having to solve all those considerations overnight.

There is nothing stopping us. We have the primitive. We have standard
syntax that uses it. All we have to do is say "...and here is a
standard API that exposes the same primitive".

Then JS programmers will have a way to call that primitive
procedurally, something they now lack.

This proposal is *not* for the immediate benefit of browsers, which
indeed need to wait for Loaders and/or <script type="module">. But
implementations that already support ES6 modules, such as
Babel+webpack, could implement this tonight. They've already got code
to load modules; they expose it via nonstandard APIs; the additional
effort to provide System.import() would be minimal. Then people
writing ES6 code today would have a complete standard module system to
code to and use.

-j