I think that we are in a situation where the number of dependency doesn't have any meaning anymore for people working on web frontend projects. Recently while revamping parts of the CI/CD at $WORK, I found out that running npm install for one of our frontend project downloads around 1 million dependencies. And npm audit reports a completely ridiculous number of security issues with them. It's just so absurd and nonse…
Ride down into JavaScript dependency hell
21–30 of 149 posts
Re: Ride down into JavaScript dependency hell
#22I think that we are in a situation where the number of dependency doesn't have any meaning anymore for people working on web frontend projects. Recently while revamping parts of the CI/CD at $WORK, I found out that running npm install for one of our frontend project downloads around 1 million dependencies. And npm audit reports a completely ridiculous number of security issues with them. It's just so absurd and nonse…
A million dependencies sound horribly excessive, even by JS standards.
Re: Ride down into JavaScript dependency hell
#23I'm not buying the narrative of "js dependency hell what are they thinking" anymore. Try installing a package for Rust. Or Go. Or ... any language, really.
Gatsby has 19k dependencies. I don't think I can find something like that for Rust. The largest, and not exactly admirable, I can find is reqwest that drags in 97. Whilst 100 is a huge number... It's an enormous gap from the many thousands.
I have a project I haven't even started yet in Rust. Three dependencies in Cargo.toml. They download and install 34 dependencies.
I've now added three more (from kube-rs readme). It's now 197 dependencies. And so on.
Re: Ride down into JavaScript dependency hell
#24I'm not buying the narrative of "js dependency hell what are they thinking" anymore. Try installing a package for Rust. Or Go. Or ... any language, really.
I’m not sure whataboutism is the way to fix the well-known issues the JS ecosystem has in package management. When I’ve installed a Go package or Python package I haven’t ended up with sometimes hundreds or thousands of sub-dependencies. Some packages can be ridiculous, but nothing like I have seen running “npm i” for something that seems like it should be simple. I apologize for not having an example off-hand but th…
As I wrote in a sibling comment, I have a project I haven't even started yet in Rust [1]. And it's measly 6 dependencies pull a total of 197.
Re: Ride down into JavaScript dependency hell
#25I'm not buying the narrative of "js dependency hell what are they thinking" anymore. Try installing a package for Rust. Or Go. Or ... any language, really.
Re: Ride down into JavaScript dependency hell
#26JavaScript is great when it's used for enabling interactive websites, but nowadays more and more websites use it to break features, which don't need JavaScript at all.
Re: Ride down into JavaScript dependency hell
#27express (common web framework) seems to have only 51 deps in lockfile jekyll has 13 I don't disagree that lots of deps = supply chain risk But there have always been variations between projects & kinds of projects re how many deps they pull in. Try following someone's ipython data science tutorial, it's requirements.txt for days I think lack of a standard lib early on plus hipster functional culture made the '10s JS…
A python equivalent to "express" would be Flask https://palletsprojects.com/p/flask/ I see 4 dependencies in the setup.py, and they are all from the same team of maintainers (i.e the Pallet team): - Werkzeug - Jinja2 - itsdangerous - click https://github.com/pallets/flask/blob/master/setup.py https://github.com/pallets/flask/network/dependencies
sanic = 18, fastapi = 3 but one of them is a 7MB download (pydantic)
yeah it's less, but also python has an amazing stdlib
Re: Ride down into JavaScript dependency hell
#28I was shocked this behavior exists when a site broke by upgrading a sub dependency. Turned out they both installed react so they used a different “creatContext” and now there were two context instances instead of one.
Re: Ride down into JavaScript dependency hell
#29I think that we are in a situation where the number of dependency doesn't have any meaning anymore for people working on web frontend projects. Recently while revamping parts of the CI/CD at $WORK, I found out that running npm install for one of our frontend project downloads around 1 million dependencies. And npm audit reports a completely ridiculous number of security issues with them. It's just so absurd and nonse…
Re: Ride down into JavaScript dependency hell
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not sure whataboutism is the way to fix the well-known issues the JS ecosystem has in package management. When I’ve installed a Go package or Python package I haven’t ended up with sometimes hundreds or thousands of sub-dependencies. Some packages can be ridiculous, but nothing like I have seen running “npm i” for something that seems like it should be simple. I apologize for not having an example off-hand but th…
Try Feathers, a "lightweight web-framework for creating real-time applications and REST APIs" clocking in at about 600 transitive dependencies. How do you audit this?