(FR): esm support

[luas10c]

I have plans to support esm for express and this may come in express 6.

I can start a PR if you guys want to help contribute.

[bjohansebas]

Hey, actually you can use ESM in your Express projects even though we export it as CommonJS, Node.js supports it.

The migration to ESM can’t be done yet until we decide which version of Node.js we want to support in Express 6, since we still need to support projects that use CommonJS. See expressjs/discussions#323 and https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v20.19.0#requireesm-is-now-enabled-by-default

[luas10c]

@bjohansebas

in this case there would be two distributions, one in esm and the other in commonjs, just like many libraries do.

[bjohansebas]

Nope, it adds unnecessary maintenance overhead. See expressjs/discussions#323, there’s the explanation of why not yet. In the future yes, but not now

If we do the migration, it will be when we can already use https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v20.19.0#requireesm-is-now-enabled-by-default but until that happens, no, it’s not an option to do it

[luas10c]

Nope, it adds unnecessary maintenance overhead. See expressjs/discussions#323, there’s the explanation of why not yet. In the future yes, but not now

If we do the migration, it will be when we can already use https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v20.19.0#requireesm-is-now-enabled-by-default but until that happens, no, it’s not an option to do it

import { createRequire } from 'node:module'
import { join } from 'node:path'

const require = createRequire(import.meta.dirname)

console.log(require(join(import.meta.dirname, '..', 'package.json')))

here you have support for require in stable modules.