Imprting Meteor 1.3 APIs into code

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The docs mention things like

import Meteor from 'meteor/meteor'

under the headings. These are completely optional right now, as we can update a vanilla 1.2 app to 1.3 and it will still work because everything is still a global, and so importing stuff doesn’t really add any benefits (or does it?) other than what you read at the top of your files.

Is there a plan to require this form at some point and completely remove globals?

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I think right now the main benefit of using imports is:

  1. You can use a linter that detects undefined variables. Previously you would have to list all of your “globals” at the top of each file.
  2. You document which packages you are using. Otherwise if someone uses a random global function it’s not clear which package that came from.

Personally I love using imports just for the self-documenting aspect.

No matter what happens, you’ll always be able to have some file called globals.js that just says global.Meteor = require('meteor/meteor'); Other than that, I don’t know what the plans are for future Meteor releases since 1.3 just launched, but there are a lot of great features that are only really possible with explicit imports, like code splitting and dead code elimination.

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