narwhal

I'm not sure I understand. ES6 modules are basically equivalent to "require". `import foo from "foo";` is the same as `var foo = require("foo");` Yes, it was Kevin Dangoor who started the CommonJS (originally "ServerJS") project and led many of the discussions. Kris Kowal and many others were instrumental as well. This is probably the pivotal mailing list thread for what became CommonJS modules: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/commonjs/Gr72Bc8Twzc I may have written the first implementation... https://github.com/tlrobinson/narwhal/commit/f960f7902fb9099... (RIP Narwhal!)

Node is the obvious leader amongst V8 shells, but there's also - https://github.com/attractivechaos/k8 and discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7913950 - http://silkjs.net/ - https://code.google.com/p/teajs/ - https://github.com/samlecuyer/sorrow.js - https://github.com/tlrobinson/narwhal - d8 (bundled with v8 source) Not counting other CommonJS-compatible platforms, or javascript shells using engines other than V8, or server-side javascript application frameworks

Built it without a hitch on a Mac. Ran the demo which seems clean and pretty snappy. I'm not familiar with how other libraries might be implemented, like mysql, sqlite, etc so I guess I'm wondering if this implementation will eventually support external libraries. Also wondering how node compares to, say, narwhal: http://github.com/tlrobinson/narwhal/commits/master which seems to be more of a std lib than a full runtime. Also, can narwhal be imported by node? All in all, really exciting. I've been wanting js on the server forever.

I wish there was a standard package management protocol. Why does every language have to reinvent package management? They could still write the package manager clients (and servers) in their language, as they all seem to love to do. We (the ServerJS pseudo working group: https://wiki.mozilla.org/ServerJS) are currently looking at package management solutions for server-side JavaScript. Using Rubygems with other languages like JS is one possibility, then we would get the Github integration for free. And there's JSAN (http://openjsan.org/). Kris Kowal hacked together one that pulls zipped repos directly from GitHub (or potentially any HTTP server) (tentatively named "tusk", implemented on "narwhal": http://github.com/tlrobinson/narwhal/tree/integration). One neat thing about that is you can create new versions just by tagging.