Flat Tree Dependency Resolution in Npm v3 • Hacker News Board

Re: Flat Tree Dependency Resolution in Npm v3

#121

Post by gelasio » Sat, Jan 02, 2016, 6:40 PM UTC

city41 wrote: post #119

gelasio wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other projects have to do a lot of work to support OS X too. So I guess I still don't see your point. Electron, for instance, had to program an entirely different object model to represent OS X's kludgy global menu bar when every other OS has menus attached to application windows. I can't believe your defending OS X though when Apple makes you buy a whole computer from them to use it...meanwhile I can run a 6 month t…

Apple is definitely not innocent here. They force a lot of terrible decisions too. I think ultimately though, this conversation boils down to my bias and experience versus your bias and experience.

Sure, everybodys bias is painfully obvious here on HN.

But I don't think that negates the fact that to develop anything at all for OS X I have to buy a whole computer from Apple, since it's damn near impossible to get a stable OS X experience by running it in a VM or directly on non-Apple hardware. Furthermore, remotely accessing Xcode on a Mac from a non-Mac computer is really painful since the only option is VNC - the bottom of the barrel, lowest common denominator of remote screen sharing protocols.

Re: Flat Tree Dependency Resolution in Npm v3

#122

Post by steveklabnik » Sat, Jan 02, 2016, 6:59 PM UTC

Touche wrote: post #79

steveklabnik wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just that, but they're working on making Node work with Chakra.

Can they make it so I can spawn a process and not worry about whether I'm spawning on unix or Windows?

I don't know it at that level of detail.

Re: Flat Tree Dependency Resolution in Npm v3

#123

Post by civodul » Thu, Jan 07, 2016, 2:20 PM UTC

tgamblin wrote: post #109

nawitus wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Language specific package managers seem to actually work in real life and are cross platform, e.g. npm. But I'm not aware of anything for e.g. C++ which would offer the features of npm (mainly installing dependencies with a single command and supporting GNU/Linux, OS X and Windows). Is there a single non-language specific package manager which is cross platform, and supports a large percentage of packages for a given…

Spack [1,2] is our attempt to do this for HPC, where we have two things going on: 1) Our applications aren't single-language. They include Fortran, Python, C, C++, Yorick (!), Lua, etc. etc. 2) We have a major combinatorial versioning problem, because HPC clusters (and scientific software in general) rely on ABI-incompatible libraries like MPI, and MANY different compilers. Spack is build-from-source and takes a lot…

I find that Spack in fact takes very little inspiration from functional package managers, Nix and GNU Guix. Dependencies are specified in a loose fashion which, on one hand, gives a lot of flexibility, but on the other hand is detrimental to reproducibility.

More importantly, part of the dependency graph, including compilers, is treated specially and essentialy considered outside of the scope of Spack. This seriously hinders reproducibility, as we tried to explain in https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01161771/en .