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The three pillars of JavaScript bloat

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Re: The three pillars of JavaScript bloat

#91

Post by socalgal2 »

sheept wrote: post #80
andai wrote: post #17

Great article, but I think these are all marginal. The main cause of bloat is not polyfills or atomic packages. The cause of bloat is bloat! I love this quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (author of the Little Prince): "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing to take away." Most software is not written like that. It's not asking "how can we make this more elegant?" It's asking "what'…

All software has bloat, but npm packages and web apps are notorious for it. Do you think it could be inherent to the language? JavaScript seems to be unique in that you want your code to work in browsers of the past and future—so a lot of bloat could come from compatibility, as mentioned in the article— and it's a language for UIs, so a lot of bloat in apps and frameworks could come from support for accessibility, in…

Every cargo install (rust) I've down downloads 300 to 700 packages

Every C++ app I install in linux requires 250 packages

Every python app I install and then pip install requirements uses 150 packages.

Re: The three pillars of JavaScript bloat

#92

Post by guax »

sheept wrote: post #80
andai wrote: post #17

Great article, but I think these are all marginal. The main cause of bloat is not polyfills or atomic packages. The cause of bloat is bloat! I love this quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (author of the Little Prince): "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing to take away." Most software is not written like that. It's not asking "how can we make this more elegant?" It's asking "what'…

All software has bloat, but npm packages and web apps are notorious for it. Do you think it could be inherent to the language? JavaScript seems to be unique in that you want your code to work in browsers of the past and future—so a lot of bloat could come from compatibility, as mentioned in the article— and it's a language for UIs, so a lot of bloat in apps and frameworks could come from support for accessibility, in…

The problem JS development is facing is the same most languages might go through. The "Magic" that solves all problems, frameworks and solutions that solve small issues at a great cost.

Lots of developers don't even say they are JS devs but React devs or something. This is normal given that the bandwidth and power of targets are so large nowadays. Software is like a gas, it will fill all the space you can give it since there is no reason to optimize anything if it runs ok.

I've spent countless hours optimising javascript and css to work across devices that were slow and outdated but still relevant (IE7, 8 and 9 were rough years). Cleverness breads in restrictive environments where you want to get the most out of it. Modern computers are so large that its hard for you to hit the walls when doing normal work.

Re: The three pillars of JavaScript bloat

#94

Post by Slothrop99 »

anematode wrote: post #8
zdc1 wrote: post #6

A lot of this basically reads to me like hidden tech debt: people aren't updating their compilation targets to ESx, people aren't updating their packages, package authors aren't updating their implementations, etc. Ancient browser support is a thing, but ES5 has been supported everywhere for like 13 years now (as per https://caniuse.com/es5 ).

The desire to keep things compatible with even ES6, let alone ES5 and before, is utterly bizarre to me. Then you see folks who unironically want to maintain compatibility with node 0.4, in 2025, and realize it could be way worse.... Ironically, what often happens is that developers configure Babel to transpile their code to some ancient version, the output is bloated (and slower to execute, since passes like regenera…

Maybe I didn't look hard enough, but there's no obvious switch to "just turn off all the legacy stuff, thnx".

Also, there has been a huge amount of churn on the tooling side, and if you have a legacy app, you probably don't wanna touch whatever build program was cool that year. I've got a react app which is almost 10 years old, there has to be tons of stuff which is even older.

Re: The three pillars of JavaScript bloat

#95

Post by [deleted] »

userbinator wrote: post #66
halapro wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> WTF is wrong with JS developers Don't confuse "one idiot who wants to support Node 0.4 in 2026" with "JS developers". Everybody hates this guy and he puts his hands into the most popular packages, introducing his junk dependencies everywhere.

Then I wish there were more of these "idiots who want to support Node 0.4 in 2026". Maybe they're the ones with the common sense to value stability and backwards compatibility over constantly trendchasing the new and shiny and wanting to break what was previously working in the misguided name of "progress".

[deleted]

Re: The three pillars of JavaScript bloat

#98

Post by onion2k »

Fallback support is a legitimate reason for additional code being in the bundle, but it's not 'bloat' because it's necessary. In an ideal world every website would generate ES5, ES6, and ES2025 bundles and serve the smallest one that's necessary for the app to run based on the browser capabilities, but that is genuinely quite hard to get right and the cost of getting it wrong is a broken app so it's understandable why devs don't.

The other two, atomic architecture and ponyfills, are simply developer inexperience (or laziness). If you're not looking at the source of a package and considering if you actually need it then you're not working well enough. And if you've added code in the past that the metrics about what browsers your visitors are using show isn't needed any more, then you're not actively maintaining and removing things when you can. That's not putting the user first, so you suck.

Re: The three pillars of JavaScript bloat

#99

Post by vkou »

Slothrop99 wrote: post #94
anematode wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The desire to keep things compatible with even ES6, let alone ES5 and before, is utterly bizarre to me. Then you see folks who unironically want to maintain compatibility with node 0.4, in 2025, and realize it could be way worse.... Ironically, what often happens is that developers configure Babel to transpile their code to some ancient version, the output is bloated (and slower to execute, since passes like regenera…

Maybe I didn't look hard enough, but there's no obvious switch to "just turn off all the legacy stuff, thnx". Also, there has been a huge amount of churn on the tooling side, and if you have a legacy app, you probably don't wanna touch whatever build program was cool that year. I've got a react app which is almost 10 years old, there has to be tons of stuff which is even older.

> Maybe I didn't look hard enough, but there's no obvious switch to "just turn off all the legacy stuff, thnx".

There is. Break compatibility for it, and whatever poor bastard that is still maintaining software that is targeting a PalmPilot is free to either pin to an older version of your library, or fork it. Yes, that's a lot of pain for him, but it makes life a little easier for everyone else.

Re: The three pillars of JavaScript bloat

#100

Post by vsgherzi »

skydhash wrote: post #3

Fantastic write up! And we're seeing rust happily going down the same path, especially with the micro packages.

Yeah I’m in the same boat here I really don’t like the dependency sprawl of rust. I understand there’s tradeoffs but I really wanna make sure we don’t end up like npm
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