Does this support globbing?

[fatcerberus]

Skimming through the proposal, it seems the import map must include a mapping for each specifier used in the project. This works well enough for module systems revolving around a package manager, like the npm ecosystem, but my use case is somewhat unique.

I have a game engine, miniSphere, with its own sandboxed file system. Files in this system are referred to using designated prefixes, for example @/file.ext refers to a file in the same directory as the game's JSON manifest and $/file.ext refers to the directory containing the game's main JavaScript module.

I'm currently in the process of porting miniSphere's API to the Web: Oozaru, however module specifiers have proven to be a sticking point as Web browsers don't currently have any support for bare specifiers. So a path like $/module.js is parsed by the browser as a bare specifier and of course this doesn't work. In trying to find ways to make it work, I discovered this proposal--but it seems to require all specifiers to be known in advance, which isn't feasible for implementing a custom file system.

I understand that it's not feasible to implement a module resolution setup like Node's, where you check for different patterns of filenames to find a module, in a Web browser. I also understand the performance concerns underpinning the decision not to support calling into JS for each import (which does prevent me from virtualizing my file system for SPK packages, but I can live with that). However, it occurred to me that I could solve my problem if the import map only supported globbing, similar to the paths option in TypeScript's tsconfig.json, where you give it a base path and a set of glob patterns to match module specifiers against:

"baseUrl": "./lib",  // <-- naked specifiers, e.g. import from "moment", will look here
"paths": {
    "$/*": [ "../src/*" ],  // all paths relative to baseUrl
    "@/*": [ "../*" ]
}

Are there any plans to support something like this? I don't think I can (easily) implement my file system any other way.

[domenic]

No, it does not support globbing. No current plans, although see #7.

[fatcerberus]

😢

[domenic]

It seems you'd be able to accomplish your use case by just mapping the "packages" $ and @. See https://github.com/domenic/import-maps#packages-via-trailing-slashes .

[fatcerberus]

Oh, I must have missed that bit - I didn't realize you could map partial specifiers. 😃

I think I must have gotten the wrong idea after I read a bit about how it was good that you had to declare all specifiers used in the program in advance... I can't find the relevant text now though. Maybe that was from before the proposal changed...