Error using cesium in Node 12 or 13

[lilleyse]

The cesium node module does not work in Node 13 due to the upgrade to ES6 modules and a breaking change in Node. The error message looks something like:

Warning: require() of ES modules is not supported.
require() of /Users/tylerlindberg/repos/forks/gltf-pipeline/node_modules/cesium/index.js from /Users/tylerlindberg/repos/forks/gltf-pipeline/gulpfile.js is an ES module file as it is a .js file whose nearest parent package.json contains "type": "module" which defines all .js files in that package scope as ES modules.
Instead rename index.js to end in .cjs, change the requiring code to use import(), or remove "type": "module" from /Users/tylerlindberg/repos/forks/gltf-pipeline/node_modules/cesium/package.json.

We've seen this issue in obj2gltf and gltf-pipeline:

CesiumGS/gltf-pipeline#507
CesiumGS/obj2gltf#225

@mramato has some ideas for fixing this before the Jan 2 release.

[mramato]

FYI, a ton of projects are affected by this change in NodeJS. even gulp appears to be broken in Node 13. Node 13 is still new and in heavy development so it'snot surprising that a lot of stuff is broken. We may have to wait until things settle down a bit before we can support Cesium in it (that might still happen before the end of they year, but right now it's best to wait and see)

[mramato]

This appears to be related to gulp not working in Node 13 either. I changed it to high and will write up a gulp issue (since I don't see one) and link to it from here.

[mramato]

This appears to be affecting Node 12 now as well.

[mramato]

This is now a major issue because most users are migrating to Node 12. While I don't think it's something we can hurry up and fix in today's release, we absolutely need to address it for 1.68 on April 1 so I updated the tag.

[mramato]

There are actually two issues here:

1. Using Cesium as node modules is broken in Node 12 & 13.
2. Cesium's build system is broken in Node 12 & 13.

2 is a showstopper for 1.68, 3 may be fixable once we address 2 but it may be blocked by third part dependencies (jsDoc).