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Micro-libraries should never be used

bvisness.me

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Re: Micro-libraries should never be used

#121

Post by inkyoto »

ristos wrote: post #66
porcoda wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all of those small composable units, that were once developed by random people, were turned into a meta-package at some point No they weren’t. Every UNIX I used in the 80s and 90s shipped with those little composable building blocks as part of the OS, and GNU bundled them in things like coreutils forever. It’s not like there was some past time when there were independent little things like cat and wc and so on writ…

They were developed by different authors...

They have evolved together, though, not in isolation from each other.

Re: Micro-libraries should never be used

#122

Post by pton_xd »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #110
Lws803 wrote: post #5

I would argue that "They should either be copy-pasted into your codebase" would cause more code liabilities and maintenance required further down the line. I've personally seen codebases with a ton of custom code, copy-pasted code, inspired implementations before and it was horrible to get them up to speed with the latest functionality / best practices. I agree that having too many micro-libraries might not be benefi…

You don't even have to talk about hypotheticals when it comes to this "vendor everything instead" philosophy. This is basically how the C world works, a lot of which is driven by a general allergy to dependencies by embedded developers - partially out of necessity (space and overhead are MUCH more important constraints in embedded land) - but also partially out of cargo culting. I guess the opinion I'll share here is…

Many industries, like AAA game development, work this way.

There's a good reason for it -- code quality and performance is important. Understanding what your code actually does and how it does it, is important.

And as a result, AAA game software is able to push the boundaries of consumer compute performance. Micro-library-built software is generally just bloated crap that barely works. But it is fast to churn out, so there's that.

Re: Micro-libraries should never be used

#123

Post by shiroiushi »

Until I read the comments here, I thought from the title that this was about those small neighborhood "libraries" that are basically a box the size of a very large birdhouse, mounted on a post, with a bunch of donated books inside that passersby are free to borrow. I was really wondering why someone would have a problem with these, unless they work for a book publisher.

Re: Micro-libraries should never be used

#124

Post by crabmusket »

bvisness wrote: post #120
crabmusket wrote: post #81

While I mainly agree with the author's substantive point, though I find some of the ways it's presented in this post not entirely convincing or fair, I am interested that someone else has identified this: > I have talked a lot about the costs of libraries, and I do hope people are more cautious about them. But there’s one factor I left out from my previous discussion. I think there’s one more reason why people use li…

I think the culture of JS has been reinforced over time, and the result is a novel form of paranoia. npm makes package-sharing easy, developers share trivial packages, people use trivial packages, people rationalize trivial packages, people teach beginners never to write code, beginners think they can never write code, beginners grow up and here we are. Certainly the language is quirky, but it really doesn't change t…

I agree, I think. The language issues, and NPM technical issues, are small contributing factors. I'd argue the culture was more a result of the physics of deploying code over the internet to varied and unreliable browsers than it was to do with anything NPM did.

Re: Micro-libraries should never be used

#126

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

pton_xd wrote: post #122
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even have to talk about hypotheticals when it comes to this "vendor everything instead" philosophy. This is basically how the C world works, a lot of which is driven by a general allergy to dependencies by embedded developers - partially out of necessity (space and overhead are MUCH more important constraints in embedded land) - but also partially out of cargo culting. I guess the opinion I'll share here is…

Many industries, like AAA game development, work this way. There's a good reason for it -- code quality and performance is important. Understanding what your code actually does and how it does it, is important. And as a result, AAA game software is able to push the boundaries of consumer compute performance. Micro-library-built software is generally just bloated crap that barely works. But it is fast to churn out, so…

Fair points. But for every bad library there are 10 rock solid ones that are going to do a better job handling edge cases and being performant than you can for almost no additional effort.

Really what this comes down to is the pickiness of package repo maintainers and general skill level of engineers within the ecosystem. This kind of crap and cruft discussed in the article happens in ecosystems where the barrier to entry is tiny. You don’t really hear about left-pad like fiascos in Java land or Rust land. Not saying all devs are great that use these technologies, but in Rust case you really don’t contribute packages without jumping over some serious learning curve hoops and in Java land the canonical repository (Maven Central) is difficult enough to contribute to that it also staves off fly-by-night contributors

Re: Micro-libraries should never be used

#128

Post by Joker_vD »

crabmusket wrote: post #81

While I mainly agree with the author's substantive point, though I find some of the ways it's presented in this post not entirely convincing or fair, I am interested that someone else has identified this: > I have talked a lot about the costs of libraries, and I do hope people are more cautious about them. But there’s one factor I left out from my previous discussion. I think there’s one more reason why people use li…

> “Thank goodness someone else has solved the problem; surely I never would have been able to.”

No, it's much more mundane: "Thank goodness someone else has solved the problem because I surely as hell don't want to solve it myself because I don't have either time or brain power/will/motivation for that". What is a number is JS? I don't even want to start thinking about it, just give me an isNumber() function. Why is it not in the standard libary in the first place?

Re: Micro-libraries should never be used

#129

Post by Joker_vD »

> One breaking change simply upgraded the minimum supported Node version from 0.10.0 to 0.12.0 and changed nothing else.

Well, that's a proper use of SemVer, not sure why you put it against the library's author. I've personally been burned enough times by libraries that for some reason think that literally being unable to compile them is somehow a backwards-compatible change, so it's refreshing to see that some people actually understand that.

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