url: add experimental URLPattern

[jasnell]

The start of a URLPattern implementation. Still very much a WIP.

Fixes: #40844

Signed-off-by: James M Snell jasnell@gmail.com

[bmeck]

this would be nice for the policies implementation eventually regardless of public API status. right now it does a new URL('..') crawl that gets really weird once you get to the protocol level.

[mcollina]

As I said multiple times in the spec repo, this is not a good API for Node.js as it will eventually become an hot path in most servers code.

[jasnell]

The API itself is Ok. The reg-ex based impl under the covers leaves lots of room for improvement. Given that this is a Web Platform API, I think there's good reason to provide an implementation but we definitely should put effort into optimizing the internals before it graduates from experimental

[mcollina]

The only way to use this API is by iterating over an array of them :(. I'm not convinced this is a good API for Node.js.

[jasnell]

That's true when using it as a router. There are plenty of use cases for using just a single pattern.

[mcollina]

I'm not aware of other use cases than URL routing. What are those?

I would like to note that there are multiple solutions in the ecosystem that are significantly better than this API for server-side routing. Landing this in node will pass the wrong message.

This is also a new API and there is no pressure right now from the ecosystem to adopt it, so I think we can wait until we can promote an extension to this API that allows to scale.

[Jamesernator]

This is also a new API and there is no pressure right now from the ecosystem to adopt it, so I think we can wait until we can promote an extension to this API that allows to scale.

Could Node just provide a utility in say url that just provides a way to optimize a list of URLPattern? i.e. something like url.optimizePatternList([urlPattern1, urlPattern2]);

Like the entire URLPattern object was designed based on the already very popular path-to-regexp library, and given that the internals can essentially just be regexps wouldn't you effectively just be merging the regexps into a single state machine.

And isn't v8's regexp engine pretty fast already? In which case just doing something like pattern1|pattern2|...|patternN would allow v8 to make this regexp for you (some slight modification would need to be done to "tag" each pattern).

[Jamesernator]

The only way to use this API is by iterating over an array of them :(. I'm not convinced this is a good API for Node.js.

So Chrome just announced an intent to prototype a URLPatternList which is meant to solve precisely this issue.

[anonrig]

@jasnell What was the reason for abandoning this?

[jasnell]

Lack of time to finish it. Happy to have someone take it on

[debadree25]

I can try attempting this, is only the TODOs in the code left, or are more spec features remaining to be implemented?