path-unified

Path-unified

This library is Node's built-in path module, exposed for usage inside browsers as well as Node, without any build-tooling required whatsoever.

Bit hard to find an NPM name that isn't currently in use for this, so I went with "-unified" because this should cover both Linux & Windows, browser & Node environments.

Mostly due to the alternatives on NPM (path-browserify, path, node-path, path-esm, etc.) being:

• CJS-only
• not up-to-date
• unmaintained
• opting out of supporting Windows :(

Usage

Same as the Node built-in module:

import { resolve } from 'path-unified';

resolve('foo/bar'); // `/absolute/path/to/foo/bar` or with \'s on windows

Also possible to default import or grab win32/posix, to force windows/non-windows env:

import path, { posix } from 'path-unified';

path.resolve('foo/bar'); // `/absolute/path/to/foo/bar` or with \'s on windows
posix.path.resolve('foo/bar'); // `/absolute/path/to/foo/bar`, always posix style

How?

I just copied https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/v21.5.0/lib/path.js and made some changes to make it workable in ESM / browser context:

• Convert to ESM -> make sure everything is importable as old, but also as tree-shakeable as possible. Note that import path from 'path-unified'; and import { win32, posix } from 'path-unified'; are quite bad for tree-shaking, you're better off importing the path utilities separately import { resolve } from 'path-unified';
• Hardcopy Node internal/constants, since node does not expose them
• Refactor Node primordials usage into just regular methods on String/Function prototype, since node does not expose primordials https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/40733 was unfortunately closed: "not a common ask"
• Hardcopy 2 validators from Node internal/validators, since Node does not expose them. I had to simplify the Error logging a bit, to prevent hard-copying too much and escalating the bundle size of this...
• Use a browser-compatible isWindows check
• Shim process.cwd() for browser (should return '/')
• Add type safety where it was missing

Disclaimer: the tests are just a few smoke tests that I run in both browser & node context, in both linux & windows. Apart from those few tests, I cannot really guarantee that my copy + patch of this built-in module doesn't contain regressions. More tests are a welcome contribution, and do let me know if something breaks.

Splitting posix/win32 for treeshaking

I'd like to improve the treeshaking capabilities of the posix/win32 imports e.g.:

import { resolve } from 'path-unified/win32';

which would be easier to treeshake than the current way:

import { posix } from 'path-unified';
const { resolve } = posix;

PR's welcome for that, I left it out for now due to personal time constraints