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This looks awesome. But I have to wonder why create a whole new project rather than fork or upstream these changes to NPM? It doesn't seem like it's doing anything fundamentally different or outside of NPM's scope of responsibility.
It is the same pattern.
I loved Bundler's deterministic builds but chafed against the Ruby limitation of only having a single version of a dependency at once. npm solved this problem elegantly, but still struggles with non-determinism. I had resigned myself to thinking that maybe these were just fundamental tradeoffs in package management that could never be resolved.
Then I had the opportunity to use Cargo, the package manager for Rust. It synthesized what, in my mind, are the best features of npm and Bundler into a single package manager, with terrific speed to boot.
Yarn looks like it will be Cargo for JavaScript. After Cargo improved on many of the great ideas of npm, those ideas are returning to help improve the JavaScript ecosystem. Cross-pollination at its best.
This also highlights a shrewd move on the part of npm: a clear decoupling between the npm registry and client, with a well-defined protocol between the two. The strength of Node is in the staggering size of its ecosystem; how those bits end up on disk is an implementation detail. This smart separation allows for this kind of experimentation on the client side, without causing the ecosystem fragmentation that happens when a new package manager requires a new registry.
I'm also happy to see that a significant amount of work has already gone into the governance model. Despite the largest contributors being Facebook employees, it looks like they've really outdone themselves making sure this is a community-run project. A BSD license, no PATENTS file, and an Ember/Rust RFC process[1]; this has all the hallmarks of a community open source project. That's critical for open infrastructure projects like this, and they've nailed it.
[1]: https://github.com/yarnpkg/rfcs
I'm very much looking forward to using Yarn in my own projects because it looks like it solves a lot of real problems I encounter every day. Thanks for all the hard work!
It looks like this addresses the biggest issues people have with npm's CLI, and it's coming from such huge names: Facebook, Google, and Tilde. Reproducible builds are a _huge_ issue, and this gives you that. Looks great! One interesting little tidbit I found from diving into the source: https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/blob/master/src/constants.js#L15 https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/blob/master/src/registries/yarn-reg…
hi! they are running a mirror of the npm registry which contains all the package data but none of the permissions/user mgmt. this means that they are still dependent on npm infrastructure. npm, Inc strongly encourages people to build and use mirrors. for example, cloudflare (where the mirror lives, and where seb used to work) has been running https://npmjs.cf/ for a long time.
I wrote a post explaining why I'm psyched to be working on it: TLDR: - open, community governance that will support long-term evolution - the technical details get a lot right out of the gate (decent performance, predictability, and security)
This is a huge leap forward for the JavaScript community—probably more than many people will realize right away. I loved Bundler's deterministic builds but chafed against the Ruby limitation of only having a single version of a dependency at once. npm solved this problem elegantly, but still struggles with non-determinism. I had resigned myself to thinking that maybe these were just fundamental tradeoffs in package m…
But at least it's a move away from NPM. I think the most problems I had with JavaScript develompent in the last 2 years came from NPM.
This looks awesome. But I have to wonder why create a whole new project rather than fork or upstream these changes to NPM? It doesn't seem like it's doing anything fundamentally different or outside of NPM's scope of responsibility.
If you look at ruby there is "gem" that you could equal to "npm". On top of that there is "bundler" that is you could equal to "yarn". It is the same pattern.
why not mirror npm modules there then?!
> Yarn, a collaboration with Exponent, Google, and Tilde. They should mention this at the very beginning. Multiple big players investing in this package manager means that we should maybe inspect a little bit more before chanting xkcd.com/927.
Basically, yarn is npm client done right reusing the same npm package repo.