proposal-built-in-modules

This is harder than it sounds. Look at the amount of effort it took to standardise temporal (new time library) and then for all the runtimes to implement it. It’s a lot of work. And what’s more, people have proposed a standard library through tc39 without success - https://github.com/tc39/proposal-built-in-modules Of course any large company could create a massive standard library on their own without going through the standards process but it might not be adopted by developers.

There is some effort to standardize something along these lines. Well, some things which combined would achieve this. It’s too late to bake it into ESM, but I believe it’ll be possible with ShadowRealms[1] and/or SES[2], and Built-in Modules (JS STL)[3]. 1: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-shadowrealm 2: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-ses 3: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-built-in-modules

There is a TC39 proposal for a standard library[1]. One of the ideas reserves a URL scheme built in modules. So to import from a language defined standard library you would use the "js" scheme (import Temporal from "js:temporal") and importing from the runtime you could potentially use e.g. "web" scheme (import AudioContext from "web:audio-context"). I really hope we will have something like that. It would both give us the option of never using magical globals and make the distinction clear whether the module comes from the language or the runtime. Although I can see a case where it could get annoying if you are writing for multiple runtimes and need to get e.g. fetch (import fetch from "runtime:fetch"). 1: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-built-in-modules

The working group most in charge of JS is ECMA's TC-39 (TC => Technical Committee) [0]. They've been taking a very deliberate, slow path to expanding the "standard" library because they take a very serious view of backwards compatibility on the web. Some proposals were shifted because of conflicts with ancient versions of things like MooTools still out in the wild, for instance. (This was the so-called "Smooshgate" incident [1].) This may speed up a bit if the Built-In Modules proposal [2] passes, which would add a deliberate `import` URL for standard modules which would give a cleaner expansion point for new standard libraries over adding more global variables or further expanding the base prototypes (Object.prototype, Array.prototype, etc) in ways that increasingly likely have backwards compatibility issues. TC-39 works all of their pro

There is a TC39 proposal for a "Javascript Standard Library." It's at stage 1, which is better than stage 0. https://github.com/tc39/proposal-built-in-modules Even so, unlikely that a "Faker" would become part of any such standard library.

There is a proposal for that[1] which introduces a `js:` pseudo-protocol for importing a build in module (or a standard library): import Temporal from "js:temporal"; 1: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-built-in-modules

The Python standard library is a lot more capable than the JS equivalents (Node or browser API). That eliminates the need for a lot of dependencies. There's been a TC39 proposal for a JS stdlib for about 2 years now: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-javascript-standard-library

That would definitely fix the "my small React CRUD SPA relies on 10k package maintainers" issue, but would still leave other issues open. There's actually an active proposal for a standard library, but it is met with a lot of contempt from the JS community [0] [0] https://github.com/tc39/proposal-javascript-standard-library...

These things are being slowly worked on: https://github.com/WICG/display-locking https://github.com/tc39/proposal-javascript-standard-library... (https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/03/kv-storage) https://github.com/tc39/proposal-observable ...etc

I recommend reading through this issue [1]. It's amazing how much the JS community is firing against a bigger standard library, just because stuff like lodash exists and everyone can make their own packages anyways. [1] https://github.com/tc39/proposal-javascript-standard-library...

The bigger story here appears to be a "Javascript Standard Library" which is summarized [1] without any list of proposed modules/packages... A key-value store isn't quite the first module that leaps to mind for such a toolkit :-) EDIT: found a collection of module proposals! [2] [1] https://github.com/tc39/proposal-javascript-standard-library [2] https://github.com/tc39/proposal-javascript-standard-library...

I agree. There's an effort to get at least a standard library namespace, but it's at month 8 of just deciding on the semantics of how to import: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-javascript-standard-library

This is a pain point that the community wishes to address: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-javascript-standard-library