I am reading Shimming from the official docs. of Webpack, but still I'm unable to get what it means ?

As I am new to Webpack, I have also tried to do some RND, but I could not get the proper answer from that. I have few questions about Shimming which are as follow :

• What is Shimming ?
• What does Shimming does actually ?
• Why there is need of Shimming in webpack ?
• How it works ?
• Pros and cons of Shimming.

If anyone knows, even few answers of the questions mentioned above, please let me know.

CodePudding user response：

Some libraries depend on global variables. For example, a jQuery plugin may expect the "$" global variable to be available.

Without shimming that variable with ProvidePlugin you would get an error $ is not defined.

In simple terms shimming would replace all global $ variables in JavaScript modules with require('jquery'). In some legacy libraries you would also need to shim jQuery or window.$ because the plugin only performs a basic text replacement.

You only need shimming for libraries or any code you do not have control over. In the application modules you should import jQuery with import $ from 'jquery' and avoid global variables.