At this point in time all browsers, and also Node.js, support standard `import`/`export` statements and we can now finally consider outputting modern JavaScript modules in the builds.[1]
In order for this to work we can *only* use proper `import`/`export` statements throughout the main code-base, and (as expected) our Node.js support made this much more complicated since both the official builds and the GitHub Actions-based tests must keep working.[2]
One remaining issue is that the `pdf.scripting.js` file cannot be built as a JavaScript module, since doing so breaks PDF scripting.
Note that my initial goal was to try and split these changes into a couple of commits, however that unfortunately didn't really work since it turned out to be difficult for smaller patches to work correctly and pass (all) tests that way.[3]
This is a classic case of every change requiring a couple of other changes, with each of those changes requiring further changes in turn and the size/scope quickly increasing as a result.
One possible "issue" with these changes is that we'll now only output JavaScript modules in the builds, which could perhaps be a problem with older tools. However it unfortunately seems far too complicated/time-consuming for us to attempt to support both the old and modern module formats, hence the alternative would be to do "nothing" here and just keep our "old" builds.[4]
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[1] The final blocker was module support in workers in Firefox, which was implemented in Firefox 114; please see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Statements/import#browser_compatibility
[2] It's probably possible to further improve/simplify especially the Node.js-specific code, but it does appear to work as-is.
[3] Having partially "broken" patches, that fail tests, as part of the commit history is *really not* a good idea in general.
[4] Outputting JavaScript modules was first requested almost five years ago, see issue 10317, and nowadays there *should* be much better support for JavaScript modules in various tools.
This has been deprecated since version `2.15.349`, which is a year ago.
Removing this will also simplify some upcoming changes, specifically outputting of JavaScript modules in the builds.
This removes the only remaining old and non-standard handling of exports in the `web/`-folder, since some initial attempts at outputting JavaScript modules in the builds have identified this file as a potential problem.
While this uses a hard-coded list, for overall simplicity, I don't believe that that's a big problem since:
- Generating this file automatically would require a bunch more parsing *every single time* that the library is built.
- The official API-surface doesn't change often enough for this to really impede development in any significant way.
- The added unit-test helps ensure that this list cannot accidentally become outdated.
By leveraging import maps we can get rid of *most* of the remaining `require`-calls in the `src/display/`-folder, since we should strive to use modern `import`-statements wherever possible.
The only remaining cases are Node.js-specific dependencies, since those seem very difficult to convert unless we start producing a bundle *specifically* for Node.js environments.
Until now we've not actually had *any* tests that ensure that the *official* PDF.js API exposes the intended functionality, which means that things can easily break accidentally.