First Steps

[mikeal]

It's time to start thinking about things we can implement today that set us up for some of the bigger ideas we've been talking about in this repo. After a nice lunch with @piscisaureus and @jasnell these two materialized as obvious requirements.

• Support and implement localized installs of node.
• Implement import w/o any stdlib.

Localized installations of node are going to help us move faster in general and make it much easier for people to build applications that use new experiments without overwriting their global install.

Supporting the import syntax is obviously going to be part of a future platform. We should probably put this behind a flag at first. import should not expose any of the current stdlib, that should only be accessible through require() but having native import w/o a stdlib opens up the possibility of people experimenting with and writing new possible stdlib modules in the ecosystem.

Thoughts?

[domenic]

Import isn't implemented in V8, so, unsure how you anticipate that experiment working.

[mikeal]

@domenic how is that gonna work btw. Obviously it needs to be in the vm but what it gets connected to will be totally different in node.js than the browser.

[domenic]

@ajklein can probably say more but my understanding is that parsing will be implemented in V8 but loading etc. will be implemented by the embedder. Not sure of the exact hooks in terms of the V8 API.

[chrisdickinson]

Support and implement localized installs of node.

To be clear: "localized" as in i18n, or "localized" as in "node's virtualenv"?

[mikeal]

I wouldn't use the term "virtualenv" but yet :)

[chrisdickinson]

Ah – are we talking about devoting time to getting this issue rolled into npm?

[mikeal]

@chrisdickinson that's one option, or maybe it's as simple as this https://github.com/mikeal/nstall I whipped up a quick proof-of-concept installer.

[jasnell]

The i18n localization stuff will come soon enough ;-) I've already implemented a good portion of it, just holding a bit to work on landing.