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whatwg
loader
JavaScript2016–2018
whatwg / loader

loader

Loader Standard

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4Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
611GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Loader Standard

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month4 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-01-22 20:17:27 UTC to 2018-05-30 16:05:19 UTC.

012016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsJan 20162016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsMar 20172017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsMay 2018

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Jan 20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Feb 20162016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20162016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20162016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC101
May 20162016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20162016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20162016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20162016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20162016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20162016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20162016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20162016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20172017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20172017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20172017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20172017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Jun 20172017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20172017-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20172017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20172017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20172017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20172017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20172017-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20182018-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20182018-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20182018-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20182018-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-06-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

4 sources
robertkrahn01·May 29, 2017
The work done by Guy Bedford and others in building SystemJS [1] is great. SystemJS is a practical implementation of the whatwg loader specification proposal [2]. Using SystemJS you can use es modules in node.js and the browser right now. On nodejs it provides an escape hatch via System._nodeRequire to fallback to node.js' require from within an es module if you really have to. The one thing that I really miss is that most (all?) JS module implementations really seem to be focused on static compile workflows. Sure, for deployments you want that, for development JS as a very dynamic language would offer much better support for live programming systems if the module systems would play along nicely. One reason why I personally was excited to see that the loader proposal initially considered custom locate/fetch/define behavior added via
Read the rest
hooks but more recent discussions about bringing it forward seem to dismiss that. I think for great tooling a module system that supports both deployment as well as development needs is necessary and would really add to the JS ecosystem. [1] https://github.com/systemjs/systemjs [2] https://github.com/whatwg/loader
In The state of JavaScript modules
MatthewPhillips·Apr 13, 2016
If you don't find JavaScript modules confusing, you should. I work on a module loader [1] and I find it quite confusing. To clarify we have 3 things: 1. import and export syntax, this is defined in ES2015. It's just syntax, it doesn't explain how modules should be loaded. 2. The Loader spec (http://whatwg.github.io/loader/) which defines a full loader including hooks to do just about anything you can possibly need. This allows you to do really crazy things like define modules dynamically and import then dynamically (which the static import/export syntax doesn't allow). We use this extensively in StealJS (or at least an older version of it) and it's pretty powerful. 3. import type=module is what this article is referring to. It defines a tag that allows you to import modules in the browser. You can't use a regular script tag, modules are d
Read the rest
ifferent; they are strict mode by default for example. If you read the GitHub issue there was some discussion of whether import type=module should use the Loader spec. It probably should. But the Loader spec isn't done so... reading the spec and seeing things like the module map [2] it sounds like import type=script defines a miniature sized loader. I don't blame them for doing this, Loader has taken too long and people are clamoring for something. The Loader spec has a weird history; it was close to being done in ES2015 but when it was ejected it sit for a long time without much work. Then around last summer it was heavily worked on and got pretty far. But now as it sits, no commits like the last 2 and a half months [3] At this point I wouldn't be surprised to see Loader go away. It's probably too controversially and too big to ever get done. I imagine the web will just have the import type=module loader and Node will do it's own this. This is going to make writing portable JavaScript as annoying going forward as it's always been. [1] http://stealjs.com/ [2] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/webappapis.html#modul... [3] https://github.com/whatwg/loader/commits
In Adding JavaScript modules to the web platform

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