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Feels like a lot of “not inventing the wheel” - which is good? There are plenty of good wheels out there.
But I don’t NEED a wheel, I just need a tarp to put over this metal frame on my patio, and for some reason the tarp manufacturer attaches wheels and plane wings to it!?
The package comes with all the bells and whistles but the final build only contains the tarp, if you import it right and tree shake it.
The problem is “I need function, library with 1000 functions has function, include.” Library’s 823rd function turns out to have a vulnerability.
Enter tree-shaking.
“Yes, I’d like a wheel. I don’t want to invent it. Why, of course, give me the full package of wheel, axis, rotor, engine, fuel tank, windshield, mirrors, tire, front panel, brakes. This wheel will be great for me manually spinning cotton!”
And I have the option to spin cotton off-road on rugged terrain…so there’s that…
Yes, but my moon rover’s wheels need to fulfill different requirements.
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Why not import all code ever created by human kind just in case we might need some of it.
…and then we can grind all the code ever created by human kind into a fine paste, and write a clever algorithm to regurgitate it as a squishy code slurry in response to questions about problems that the standard libraries already solved.
And this is why tree shaking exists.
I feel like the end result of tree shaking would be the image here https://fedia.io/m/programmer_humor@programming.dev/t/2547352/CSS-Gardening
Gotta fix that link
Works on my machine…
the one on the right is also packages in node_modules that you’re actually using and specifically requested.
Very true.
Python feels like that sometimes too. Except much more standard library which is much better than node modules.
Rust as well. Seems to just be a modern language thing.
I sort of have a suspicion that there is some mathematical proof that, as soon as it becomes quick and easy to import an arbitrary number of dependencies into your project along with their dependencies, the size of the average project’s dependencies starts to follow an exponential growth curve increasing every year, without limit.
I notice that this stuff didn’t happen with package managers + autoconf/automake. It was only once it became super-trivial to do from the programmer side, that the growth curve started. I’ve literally had trivial projects pull in thousands of dependencies recursively, because it’s easier to do that than to take literally one hour implementing a little modified-file watcher function or something.
Its certainly more painful to collect dependencies with cmake, so its not worth doing if you can hand roll your own easily enough.
The flip side is that by using a library, it theoretically means it should be fairly battle-tested code, and should be using appropriate APIs. File watching has a bunch of different OS specific APIs that could be used, in addition to the naive “read everything periodically” approach, so while you could knock something together in an hour, the library should be the correct approach. Sadly, at least in rust land, there are a ton of badly written libraries to wade through… 🤷
Yeah. I have no idea what the answer is, just describing the nature of the issue. I come from the days when you would maybe import like one library to do something special like .png reading or something, and you basically did all the rest yourself. The way programming gets done today is wild to me.
I’m not sure its a problem in of itself, but i agree it definitely enables a problem. Between “is-even” and vibe coding, modern software engineering is in a very sorry state.
Yeah. I feel like in a few years when literally nothing works or is maintainable, people are going to have a resurgent realization of the importance of reliability in software design, that just throwing bodies and lines of code at the problem builds up a shaky structure that just isn’t workable anymore once it grows beyond a certain size.
We used to know that, and somehow we forgot.
At least Rust compiles down to what is used. I don’t know if js has any of that, but at least with rust the final program doesn’t ship tons of bloat.
Yes and no, the linker does nicely trim a lot of the fat, but rust binaries are still pretty chonky. Its good chonky (debug etc), and static compile doesnt help, but they are quite fat.
Also doesnt help compile times that you have to build all this extra stuff, only to throw most of it away.
also applicable to “installing modern drupal via composer”.
Also C programmers using glibc
I should check Go’s pkg folder…
Rust is like nodejs
