Eximjs

From ES Modules to CommonJS Modules

Motivation

In 2015, the ECMASCript TC39 standards committee finalized the syntax for exporting and importing modules. Implementing the full standard has been problematic, and there has been considerable delay. In the interim, developers wishing to write forward-compatible code can use the new ES Module syntax and transpile it back to the old CommonJS syntax. The eximjs command line utility can be used to do that.

Prerequisites and installation

The eximjs utility uses Node.js. Package installation is done via NPM. These are the only two prerequisites.

To install the utility and make it available to your Bash shell, use this command.

[user@host]# npm install -g eximjs

Usage

The software is invoked from the command line with:

[user@host]# eximjs [source file] [destination file] 

The following conversions are performed:

Note that absolute paths, those beginning with /, are not allowed.

Also, as of Dec 2019, the Node.js platform allows the filename extension to be omitted, but the Chrome browser module system does not.

For the most efficient use of resources, this utility should be invoked by a build tool that is sensitive to file modification timestamps, so that it is triggered for each file in a nested hierarchy only when a source file is changed. (The Read Write Tools prorenata builder has this capability.)

Licens

The eximjs command line utility is licensed under the MIT License.

Availability