Hi @dnolen, I'm seeking your opinion please: When running cljs on node, and doing a require of a foreign lib, the foreign lib script is run even if that foreign lib ns has been required before. IOW foreign lib requires appear to work differently to regular ns requires. does this sound like a bug to you? There's more context about the particular reason this is causing me a problem here: https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript-site/issues/320

@henryw374 sidenote, you should file issues in JIRA not the GitHub issues for the website

@henryw374 but reading over that - there is no bug

seems like an issue w/ how you're trying to use random foreign-libraries, nothing specific to the foreign library feature in general

stepping back - I don't know why you need to bother

under Node.js you can use NPM libraries in a straightforward manner

@mfikes which reminds me - we should probably clarify the alpha bit about :npm-deps

it may give the impression that the Node.js support is a problem

it's not - that work is effectively done

@dnolen so are you saying foreign-libs are not intended to work on node? re: why I need to bother. I am the author of a cljs lib that depends on a foreign-lib. in it's docs it says 'if you're using shadow, do xyz'. so update that to include node? And ideally detect if the foreign-lib is being used on node and throw Currently, it kind of works as-is on node rather than completely or not at all.

@henryw374 no

I didn't say that, I said what you're trying to do - there no magic way for that to work

using random libraries that were packaged for the browser

libraries that must be consumed differently for different tools is not a good idea IMO

is there any way around that though if you want to depend on an npm-lib? npm-deps?

what you really want to do is on the near todo-list btw

https://gist.github.com/swannodette/ebd8b65f887318ba68579b6bea911daf

@henryw374 the real answer is to have better integration w/ tools that solve this problem for JS already

but at the moment you don't have a ton of general options

React can in fact probably be made to work - but I would consider it too expert of an option for most poeple

what Thomas Heller was trying to say in the issue was the CLJSJS in general assumes browser - because that what most users are doing

that means they package a browser artifact

often that will create problems when loading that thing in Node

but that's not an issue w/ foreign libs - that's just how people use CLJSJS

fair enough. in my case, it would work on node if the foreign-lib require executed the script once at most, but I accept that's not a generally a problem. I'll have a read to understand the proposal. For now my lib will continue to need workarounds

the short summary

eliminate this problem entirely

everything is already in NPM, if you're using Node.js there's nothing to do

if you targeting the browser then support webpack build step and hide all the boring details

important thing - nobody is spending time packaging anything and potentially in the wrong way

finally, allow users to do exactly what you've described

your lib wants a transitive dep on something in NPM

ok cool. I need to read up more, but it sounds like the bottom line is that users of my lib will really need to have npm installed as a pre-requisite. Which seems reasonable, but inevitably that will put some people off I guess. It'd be interesting to know what proportion of cljs users that'd be

A lot of people will have Node installed - it’s really no longer rare

let me know if there are some tickets that need attending to

planning on working a bit more on the Closure library parsing stuff as well as dipping my toes into the transitive npm deps work