esbuild 0.8.26

v0.8.26

on Node.js NPM

Ensure the current working directory remains unique per startService() call

The change in version 0.8.24 to share service instances caused problems for code that calls process.chdir() before calling startService() to be able to get a service with a different working directory. With this release, calls to startService() no longer share the service instance if the working directory was different at the time of creation.

Consider import references to be side-effect free (#613)

This change improves tree shaking for code containing top-level references to imported symbols such as the following code:

import {Base} from './base'
export class Derived extends Base {}

Identifier references are considered side-effect free if they are locally-defined, but esbuild special-cases identifier references to imported symbols in its AST (the identifier Base in this example). This meant they did not trigger this check and so were not considered locally-defined and therefore side-effect free. That meant that Derived in this example would never be tree-shaken.

The reason for this is that the side-effect determination is made during parsing and during parsing it's not yet known if ./base is a CommonJS module or not. If it is, then Base would be a dynamic run-time property access on exports.Base which could hypothetically be a property with a getter that has side effects. Therefore it could be considered incorrect to remove this code due to tree-shaking because there is technically a side effect.

However, this is a very unlikely edge case and not tree-shaking this code violates developer expectations. So with this release, esbuild will always consider references to imported symbols as being side-effect free. This also aligns with ECMAScript module semantics because with ECMAScript modules, it's impossible to have a user-defined getter for an imported symbol. This means esbuild will now tree-shake unused code in cases like this.

Warn about calling an import namespace object

The following code is an invalid use of an import statement:

import * as express from "express"
express()

The express symbol here is an import namespace object, not a function, so calling it will fail at run-time. This code should have been written like this instead:

import express from "express"
express()

This comes up because for legacy reasons, the TypeScript compiler defaults to a compilation mode where the import * as statement is converted to const express = require("express") which means you can actually call express() successfully. Doing this is incompatible with standard ECMAScript module environments such as the browser, node, and esbuild because an import namespace object is never a function. The TypeScript compiler has a setting to disable this behavior called esModuleInterop and they highly recommend applying it both to new and existing projects to avoid these compatibility problems. See the TypeScript documentation for more information.

With this release, esbuild will now issue a warning when you do this. The warning indicates that your code will crash when run and that your code should be fixed.