Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

For the record, inside ResourceLoader context $ is a local variable provided by the ResourceLoader built-in closure.

See also bug 48886.

I suggest for standalone we introduce an module-intro/outro that is used to wrap around individual modules (not per file).

So e.g. dist/ve.core.js would be:

-- intro
( function ( ve, $ ) {
 -- include ve.js
 -- include ve.A.js
 -- include ve.B.js
 -- include ve.C.js
-- outro
}( VisualEditor, jQuery ) );

And in MediaWiki the same would effectively happen but on-demand by ResourceLoader (since we don't want to use a build system for MW, but instead work on the raw source files directly and have them build dynamically).

See bug 48886 for details, but the end result would be:

-- startup:
register(
 ..,
 [ 'ext.visualEditor', 1234, ...., ['VisualEditor']
);

-- mw.loader:
 script( $, global[propKeys..].. );

-- load.php response when loading visualeditor:
mw.loader.implement( 'ext.visualEditor.core', function ( $, ve ) {
 -- include ve.js
 -- include ve.A.js
 -- include ve.B.js
 -- include ve.C.js
} );

Rephrasing bug.

Problems:


* We're repeatedly referencing $/mw from global scope instead of securing the reference. This is worse for performance and for proper functioning (e.g. jQuery might be redefined at a later time causing version mismatches, this is why ResourceLoader maps $) 

* We're using $ and mw directly instead of mapping jQuery and mediaWiki.

* In standalone, our code executes in the global scope. This is bad.

Solution:

* For standalone, build the dist/ files with a closure mapping, securing and caching '$' from 'jQuery'. And for VE modules other than ve.base, it would also map 've' to 'VisualEditor' (bug 67642)

* In MediaWiki, ResourceLoader already provides a closure which we'd extend to also map 've' to 'VisualEditor'.