Dojo 1.6 - dojo.require (still) loads packages synchronously

I was under the impression that RequireJS was going to change the loader experience. In retrospect I now see the caveats and qualifiers (see links).

Given this block of code:

dojo.require("dojo.string");
dojo.ready(function () {
    alert(dojo.string.pad("hello", " ", 10));
});

What happens? Unfortunately it's the same thing that happened in 1.5. I was hoping the loader was modified to use RequireJS and load the package asynchronously but that is not the case. The dojo/string.js is loaded using http.open('GET', uri, false), which is a synchronous load:

1. You can optionally provide a second parameter, omitModuleCheck, or rely on _global_omit_module_check, to determine if a test should be made to make sure "dojo.string" is actually defined after loaded.
   
2. _loadedModules it tested to see if "dojo.string" is already loaded (it is not).
   
3. _getModuleSymbols is called to convert "dojo.string" into a path (utilizes _modulePrefixes), resulting path is "./string.js"
   
4. _loadPath("./string.js", "dojo.string") is called, because path is not absolute, baseUrl is used to calculate the uri, in my case this is "scripts/dojo/./string.js".
   
5. Because omitModuleCheck was not true, _loadPath was called with a module name ("dojo.string") and because it was called with a module name it calls _loadUriAndCheck instead of _loadUri. Note that currentModule is assigned "dojo.string".
   
6. _loadUriAndCheck calls _loadUri and later checks to make sure "dojo.string" was added to _loadedModules.
   
7. _loadUri tests _loadedUrls to make sure "scripts/dojo/./string.js" is not already loaded. It then invokes _getText which does a synchronous GET and returns the javascript as a string. That value is dojo.eval'd, to load the code into memory.
   

NOTE: The currentModule was set for no apparent reason so I looked into it and found that it is also referenced by the "define" method (in loader.js) and used to convert "dojo.string" into "dojo/string". It only does this when two parameters are provided to the define method.


Related Links
RequireJS
RequireJS/AMD Module Forms