Hermes: URL interface

[ghost]

Other projects like Deno support this:

~~~

new URL('https://github.com')
URL { _parts: { protocol, username, password, hostname, port, path, query,
hash}, _searchParams: URLSearchParams { params: [], url: [Circular], append:
[Function], delete: [Function], set: [Function] } }
~~~

However Hermes does not:

~~~

new URL('https://github.com')
ReferenceError: Property 'URL' doesn't exist
~~~

https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/API/URL

[tmikov]

Thank you for pointing this our. Hermes doesn't currently implement the URL constructor because it is part of the web platform (https://spec.whatwg.org/), not ECMAScript, and Hermes is not supposed to run in browsers.

With that said, we realize that it can be a useful feature. Implementing in Hermes however would be a non-trivial binary size increase of Hermes, which would affect everybody, even apps that don't need it.

We recommend using a polyfill like https://www.npmjs.com/package/whatwg-url or https://www.npmjs.com/package/url-polyfill .

For more context a similar issue is being tracked at https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/16434 .

[dzek69]

IMO React Native shouldn't expose global URL then, because it does a lot of other things are build to be browser-compatible like fetch (and bare XMLHttpRequest), alert, requestAnimationFrame.

Keeping SOME compatible globals and having some well-known but incompatible is counter-intuitive.

And it's hard to fix issues caused by that sometimes (because if some library depends on global URL the only thing I can do is to override URL with compatible solution... while possibly breaking things that depended on non-compatible global implementation...).

I'd suggest in the next breaking release of RN to rename that non compatible global into something else.

To keep conversation clean - upvote if you agree. Discuss if you have different views/solutions.

[tmikov]

I agree. In fact I am not entirely sure that RN exposes a global URL. Does it? It has an URL module, but I didn't see code installing it in the global object (but I could have missed it).

I think it would be more constructive to discuss this in the RN issue rather than here.

[tmikov]

Closing for now with "wontfix". If in the future our thinking changes, we can revisit.

[vicary]

For others ended up here in the future. The recommended polyfills doesn't even work, both throws when calling new URL(...).