Lint incompatible module loading mechanism (CJS vs ESM)

[Boshen]

You are doomed if you see ERR_REQUIRE_ESM or similar error messages with ESM, you'll spend hours googling and trying out different solutions to make things work.

As a linter, I think we may be able help with the situation by figuring out your incompatible usage and tell you what to do?

Similar project: https://github.com/arethetypeswrong/arethetypeswrong.github.io

My first questions are:

• Is this a good idea?
• Is this doable (as a linter written in Rust)?

[Boshen]

Response from Andrew: https://twitter.com/atcb/status/1674299679063015424

[strager]

Is this a good idea?

Yes. I don't know if it's a good idea for Oxc, though.

Is this doable (as a linter written in Rust)?

Why wouldn't it be doable?

[andrewbranch]

I have a related idea that I think would be super useful. If you land functionality like this, and if you build a full module graph, it seems like you would be able to help authors detect and avoid the dual-package hazard. For example, if a project has a tree like

my-esm-project/
  node_modules/
    cjs-only-dep
    dual-dep

and a file like

// index.mjs
import {} from "cjs-only-dep";
import {} from "dual-dep";

Now suppose that cjs-only-dep also has a dependency on dual-dep. cjs-only-dep likely accesses the CJS format of dual-dep via require, while index.mjs accesses the ESM format of dual-dep. So the user has included two different formats of the same package. But this tends not to be easily visible to the user until they hit mysterious problems.