ESM plugin support

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched existing issues, it hasn’t been reported yet

Use case description

ESM plugin support allows use of pure ESM package for plugin development.

for example:

export default class MyPlugin {
  constructor() {
    // ...
  }
}

Proposed solution (optional)

Dynamic import can be used for that purpose.

[pgrzesik]

Thanks a lot for additional clarification @frozenbonito - I didn’t notice that it was accepted later as a nonexperimental feature 👍

I like the suggestion that @medikoo proposed and if we can ensure such fallback without causing any issues for users that do not use ESM-based plugins then that would be perfect 👍

[medikoo]

Node v12 started to be LTS with v12.13.0, and this is the base we aim to support. Nonetheless, I think this can be supported via a progressive enhancement like approach

In v12 which supports ESM, when we attempt to require ESM module, we get an error with ERR_REQUIRE_ESM code. Having that we may fallback to import (which is safe to be used in a controlled way in all v12 versions), and that way via recovery logic we can provide support to ESM plugins.

I think it’s not that difficult to add. It’ll require reconfiguring one internal function to async (which feels safe at quick glance).

One quirk will be, that processing given service will work differently with v12.13.0, where we cannot load ESM at all, and in latest v12, but I think that’s fine