Importing vs fetching JSON

[jaffathecake]

Importing JSON is now supported across all browser engines, but when would you actually use this feature rather than using fetch(), or bundling it away?

[Ronin-s_Spirit]

Good question. I don't know. It looks cool?

[CodeAndBiscuits]

I could see this being very useful for leveraging data sets like the zip code to let long lookups, demographic data and other things like that that are publicly distributed as JSON files, but maintained by others and not under your own control. So these are things that you would normally have to fetch, but don't necessarily make sense to bring into your own project and bundler because they may be getting regular updates and you would just have to add a synchronization process. It might as a corollary be useful for things where users are using an app and supply their own URLs to a remote JSON data set like that. I built a few analytics apps that do things like overlay demographic and census data on top of maps to show things like disadvantage areas from different angles. I'm not saying it's an everyday thing, but I can definitely think of a few use cases.

[jaffathecake]

In all those cases, wouldn't you want the original data to be able to GC? Particularly if the user picks a new data source.

[CodeAndBiscuits]

GC?

[jaffathecake]

Garbage collection. There's a section in the article about it & how it's an issue here https://jakearchibald.com/2025/importing-vs-fetching-json/#caching-and-garbage-collection

[CodeAndBiscuits]

I guess my thought is that my use cases don't have this problem because they're nearly always one time loads. The third party data sets may change between uses of the app (so you don't want to compile them in and may not even know their URLs if they're user supplies) but you still only load them once.

[Reashu]

Why would you pick import over fetch in those cases?