Support ES6 modules

[caseyjhol]

Describe your feature request here.

Are there any plans to support ES6 modules in addition to CommonJS?

Example JS:

function hello(items) {
    console.log("hello world");
}

export {hello};

Trying to use this with PythonMonkey currently throws an error:

    return createRequire(filename)(moduleIdentifier)
           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
pythonmonkey.SpiderMonkeyError: Error in file [python code], on line 0:
Error: Python str: Error in file evaluate, on line 5:
export default hello;
^
SyntaxError: export declarations may only appear at top level of a module

Code example

No response

[Hamada-Distributed]

Howdy! Thank you for the feature request! It's not explicitly in our roadmap, but I think it would be an interesting add to our feature set. @wesgarland @caleb-distributive What do you think?

[jarmitage]

I would use PythonMonkey if this was possible!

[wesgarland]

The long-term plan is to support ES modules and Python modules interchangeably.

Node's ES module support is, IMO, not very good and quite confusing. IMO ES modules should be loaded via import statements, not require().

It's not clear to me if require() can/will ever import ES modules, I haven't studied this problem closely enough. But it should be possible to write JS code with PythonMonkey like this some day:

import * as pandas from "pandas";

const dataset = {
  cars: ["BMW", "Volvo", "Ford"],
  passings: [3, 7, 2]
};

const df = pandas.DataFrame(dataset);

... and not care whether "pandas" is a Python module or an ES module.

[jarmitage]

@wesgarland any further updates?