[question] Polyfills and external dependencies

[cha-king]

Heyo!

Thanks for putting this repo together. Super useful in getting Typescript up-and-running in Max.

I'm left with a couple of questions that I figure someone might have some experience with:

1. From code running in the js object, can any code be imported from npm packages? Or does anything imported need to be local?
2. I saw mention of polyfills in the README to enable functionality beyond ES5, but had some issues getting that working. Does anyone have any pointers or recommendations for doing so?

Thanks!

[twhiston]

Hi!

From code running in the js object, can any code be imported from npm packages? Or does anything imported need to be local?

Yep, local code only in the js object. If you need npm packages you need to use the node object.

I saw mention of polyfills in the README to enable functionality beyond ES5, but had some issues getting that working. Does anyone have any pointers or recommendations for doing so?

Let me know what issues you have and maybe I can help specifically. In the meantime maybe check out how I added them in my REPL project, which should give you some pointers https://github.com/twhiston/tw.gl.repl/tree/dev/javascript/src/extensions
The object extension might be the most interesting example as the others are just adding functions to the prototype directly

Thanks

[cha-king]

Apologies for the delayed response, but thanks! I'll check that out!

I was also curious, have you done any experimentation with using a bundler for adding in third-party dependencies?

[twhiston]

I’ve not had great results with bundling, but that’s more due to the fact that most dependencies are built with node in mind as a framework so obviously they don’t work in a vanilla js environment.

Now we have v8 in max 9 though you can use require to pull in any other JS in your max path, which is very useful.