Tracking issue: require(esm)

[joyeecheung]

Before it's unflagged

• [ ] Figure out default export interop with transpilers, either adding __esModule to required ESM on our end (https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/52166), or transpilers update themselves to check the result returned by require():
• [ ] Create new conditional exports for ESM-first resolution (something like https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/52173#issuecomment-2015419152 - maybe this doesn't need to block unflagging, but should be done before stablization)
• [x] Add experimental warning before unflagging

Before it is promoted to be stable:

• [x] Implement detection https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/52047
• [ ] Support module customization hooks https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/52219

Nice-to-haves:

• [ ] https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/52180
• [x] https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/52599

[RedYetiDev]

(Slightly unrelated) Maybe we should add a new tracker label to the repo?

[GeoffreyBooth]

@nodejs/loaders

[jakebailey]

I just wanted to note it here, but it would be super super awesome if (once stable) this were backported to Node 20/22 or even Node 18 if still in support. I'd love to be able to propose a change to switch TypeScript to ESM (given I have it working without breaking CJS consumers), but the time horizon of Node 22 being the oldest supported version is pretty daunting.

It also seems like there is a hacky way using multiple entrypoints that could allow for TS to grab Node's builtins conditionally without #52599/#52762, though none of that is possible without require(ESM), of course.

Even without TypeScript's use case, I think the feature itself is a really important one for the ecosystem. Backporting would really make ESM changeovers a lot less painful.

[Andarist]

IIRC from some Twitter threads - there is a plan to backport this once the feature stabilizes.