this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
145 points (98.0% liked)

Programming

17303 readers
57 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
snowe@programming.dev
Ategon@programming.dev
MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz
145
Why is the Node ecosystem so demanding? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 year ago by planish@sh.itjust.works to c/programming@programming.dev
55 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Start a Node project that uses at least five direct dependencies.
  2. Leave it alone for three months.
  3. Come back and try to install it.

Something in the dependency tree will yell at you that it is deprecated or discontinued. That thing will not be one of your direct dependencies.

NPM will tell you that you have at least one security vulnerability. At least one of the vulnerabilities will be impossible to trigger in your particular application. At least one of the vulnerabilities will not be able to be fixed by updating the versions of your dependencies.

(I am sure I exaggerate, but not by much!)

Why is it like this? How many hours per week does this running-to-stay-in-place cost the average Node project? How many hours per week of developer time is the minimum viable Node project actually supposed to have available?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] bouncing@partizle.com 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

At least part of it is that JavaScript is not really a batteries included language like Python or Java to even PHP.

You can’t really do anything productive without relying on a third party library.

[–] BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Most of those are server-side languages and I'd disagree with the assessment. For web services Java needs some kind of server like Jetty, Undertow, or Tomcat. For testing you need JUnit or NGTest. And for common, everyday utilities you need something like Apache Commons or Guava. These things don't "ship" with Java (and there's actually a fair amount of runtimes now, it's not only Oracle).

The thing that seems to benefit Java over Node is major corporate support (Oracle, RedHat, IBM) so for better or worse you can usually rely on a handful of essential tools being updated regularly.

[–] bouncing@partizle.com 3 points 1 year ago

I wouldn't say you need no dependencies in a Java project, but by all means check the average number of dependencies you get with Java or Python and compare it to almost any Node project.

You could probably sample projects on GitHub, look at the dependency graph, and compare.

[–] elbarto777@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

This is not universally true. You totally can, especially today.

[–] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

All the languages you mentioned have some core APIs included and need to rely on third party libraries for more.

[–] bouncing@partizle.com 1 points 1 year ago

Yes, that's true, but JavaScript has very few core APIs aside from basic DOM manipulation. Even things like comparing timezones requires a third party dependency, for example.