Hey everyone! I've been working on issue #52965, and it was recommended that I suggest my improvements to the current REPL incrementally instead of doing a full overhaul. This issue will track my progress, so any suggestions can be made without bothering reviewers.

Here are the changes I'm planning to implement:

• Syntax Highlighting repl: support syntax highlighting #53571

• Use only vm, without an inspector session
  Migrating to only use VM will allow the REPL to survive the deletion of important internals, as it will be operating under a different context. Additionally, it will allow the REPL to run in both a CJS context and an ESM context. It should (in theory) help fix/lessen the impact of many issues, such as the ones below (and various others):

  • Repl has "Unexpected token ','" when both await and second argument to dynamic import are used #47463
  • Repl Crashes in infinite Async recursion #40502
  • REPL is evaluating new lines before finishing execution of previous ones #39387
  • crash in repl mode by vm async timeout #38503
  • Async output in repl is showing after the prompt #35895
  • "Support" static import in repl #34750
  • lib: the REPL should survive deletion of Array.prototype methods #31457
  • repl / eval: CommonJS globals leak into ESM modules #30842

• Refactor class to use ECMAScript

  This will help with the implementation of multiple loaders (CJS and ESM), as the class will be extendable (in parts).

CC @nodejs/repl