Adding JavaScript modules to the web platform
This comment is gonna be bikeshedding, and definitely not a popular opinion in today&#x27;s &quot;modern&quot; JS community, but here it goes anyways...<p>I don&#x27;t understand why TC39 had to define a new syntax, new semantics, and new <i>restrictions</i> for modules in JS land when the JS community had <i>already</i> created solutions for modules in JS. People were using modules in JS before they knew that &quot;loader&quot; or &quot;static import&#x2F;exports&quot; were a thing to be landed in ES6 in future.  And frankly, what the JS community made for themselves was a lot more saner than what is coming natively to JS, and even more so compared to the native solutions for module loading in some other languages (compare to Python for example). I don&#x27;t think any JS programmer wanted modules natively in JS. And with HTTP2, they would have just stopped bundling and a newer async implementation of `require` would have been conjured.<p>And all this &quot;tree-shaking&quot; etc. that is claimed to be possible only with the static syntax is blatantly incorrect. It is entirely possible to eliminate unused code with the commonjs&#x2F;amd&#x2F;umd way with a slightly more intelligent bundler. And the new &quot;syntax&quot; that they created is just a variant of destructuring. You can achieve nearly the same with ES6 destructuring and `require`.<p><i>sigh</i>