[WIP] add esm support

[1dcbh]

WIP! I just created the PR to pull locally, will run tests are report back soon.

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[alcuadrado]

Thanks for sending this PR. Unfortunately, I don't think this approach will work. I left a comment explaining why.

[alcuadrado]

This will lead to a race condition. Same for packages/hardhat-core/src/internal/lib/hardhat-lib.ts

[1dcbh]

Yes, sorry for the noise but github.dev required me to create a PR in order to pull this locally

So, my idea is to export an {initialized} field that needs to be awaited by folks that are using es-imports,

import hre from 'hardhat';

async function main () {
  await hre.initialized;
  ...
}

this would be backwards compatible with esm as the try {} catch {} above would not return a promise to them, so it should still keep keep compatibility w/ plugins.

Wdyt?

[alcuadrado]

Unfortunately that would be a breaking change

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[phated]

The way that hardhat imports tasks and plugins also won't work with ESM because all ESM modules are executed async and hardhat plugins often rely on the ordering of those imports.

[alcuadrado]

That's an excellent point, @phated! thanks

[fvictorio]

Everything suggests that adding support for ESM is a major endeavor that we won't be able to do until our next major (v3, which is not even in our roadmap). So I think we should close this, unless you see some way forward @1dcbh.