[jannes]

I wish there was something I could do about reducing the contents of the node_modules folder instead of hiding the files somewhere else on disk.

It angers me how many dependencies very simple projects amass.

[zkochan]

This change will reduce the size node_modules uses up (10 or more times).

pnpm saves one version of a package only ever once on a disk and node_modules consume drastically less space

[zkochan]

here's an article about how much less disk space is used by pnpm. This concept will probably come with the same disk space savings http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/npm-yarn-pnpm-which-packag...

but this concept is fresh, pnpm already works;)

[the_duke]

It's actually relatively easy, I've recently written a non-trivial project with exactly 2 dependencies.

You just need to forgo all the conveniences the ecosystem provides and write stuff yourself instead.

Node.js or the browser have everything you need.

[protonfish]

I've been trying to clean up my excess node modules and found that when building a web-socket app, you don't need express (native http works fine) and you don't even need socket.io (unless your project needs to work on IE 9 or less) It's hard to find examples so I wrote one: https://github.com/chrisbroski/bare-socket

[codingdave]

Bringing packages into your work is your own choice. You should always be doing an evaluation of the benefit given by a package vs. the bloat it brings to your project. For many packages, it is worth it. But if you are in the habit of installing a package just to avoid writing a widget in your UI or writing some helper functions, then... yes, your projects will amass dependencies quickly.

[jannes]

My main complaint is probably about webpack and its dependencies. Unfortunately, it seems to be the accepted standard bundler. The benefits of hot module replacement are too nice to forego easily.

[mschuetz]

The ridiculous amount of dependencies in webpack is one of the major reasons I went for rollup. I refuse to install anything that depends on is-odd.

[mifreewil]

Not sure that webpack still depends on `is-odd` (at least not directly). Note that `is-odd` depends on `is-number` facepalm. Some people in this world seem to think their purpose is to create as many JS modules as possible.