Written Proposal for "package" Keyword for ES20XX Imports

[Greg McLeod]

Thanks Ryan. I think there would be a bit of an issue with introducing
dictionary support alone in that it does not provide a new way for the
language to define where modules actually live in the application itself as
opposed to the file system. This misses out on the benefits the package
keyword could provide. "package" should impose some limitations on the
top-most scope of a module to facilitate the ability to define the packages
before actually executing a module's body.

To elaborate, one of the biggest benefits I'd like to emphasize is the
complete isolation of dependency resolution and actual module body
execution.

The package keyword in my proposal would allow you to arbitrarily say
"here's the complete structure of my app, all dependencies already
resolved" and subsequently take action on it after it has been fully loaded
into memory in its entirety. Augmenting existing import syntax cannot allow
this since the core body of each module is being executed amidst the
dependency graph being resolved as each "import" is encountered by the
interpreter.


On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 12:52 PM, Ryan Birmingham <rainventions at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I like the idea you're working from here, it seems to partially resemble
> header files. I'm not sure if a package keyword is needed though; couldn't
> you accomplish the same thing with just adding dictionary support and an
> optional alias parameter to import/export?
>
> -Ryan Birmingham
>
> On 21 February 2017 at 12:27, Greg McLeod <cleod9 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Back in 2015 I was working on a proposal for the "package" keyword, but
>> stopped prematurely as ES6/ES2015 had already been shipped. Since then I've
>> been occasionally iterating on it anyway in order to flesh out my ideas
>> with how it could fit with the new import syntax. I wanted to share with
>> the mailing list to get some feedback on it, as well as help facilitate
>> some of the discussion regarding future import syntax.
>>
>> Proposal can be found here:
>> https://gist.github.com/Cleod9/7f73017905d124210ec8
>>
>> I should note that a lot of this is derived from an ActionScript to
>> JavaScript proof-of-concept transpiler I wrote a few years back. (Live
>> demo: https://as3js.org/demo/ ). I believe this type of package
>> syntax/behavior has already been possible since ES5, although I have yet to
>> find any proposals for the keyword that resemble that of battle-tested
>> languages like Java/C#.
>>
>> I think there are a lot of time-saving qualities that packages could
>> provide for bundled JS applications we have yet to explore, and it could
>> even open the door to a JS standard library. Even if this doesn't go
>> anywhere I certainly hope by making this proposal public it will be a
>> useful for reference for what is possible in the current state of affairs.
>>
>> Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
>>
>> Greg
>>
>> P.S. Screen-cap of a potential IDE future with packages:
>> http://i.imgur.com/D5EGNUN.gifv
>>
>>
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>> https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
>>
>>
>
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