[userbinator]

The referenced AppSignal post about 13,000 dependencies for a todo list is conflating dependencies required for the build tooling with dependencies that are actually bundled in to the web app.

The point is that a dependency is a dependency, and making software needlessly complex in any way is bad.

I've run into this a lot with open source stuff (not even JavaScript, just native code): I want to fix/modify something, and I know it's open-source, so it should be easy, right? After looking at the sprawling dependency tree, and the effort it would take to set up a build environment --- which might not even give me the same output as the original binaries, which are working perfectly fine except for the part I want to change --- I decide I'll just find the locations with a debugger and patch the binary directly.

tl;dr: the complaint is equally valid when applied to build tools, which are themselves also software and becoming bloated.

[nicoburns]

"Effort to set up a build environment" is pretty much exclusively a problem with C and C++ code. Pretty much every other language has standard build tooling. e.g. with JavaScript you can 'npm install' and you're set.

[fsh]

Unless of course the developer uses yarn or whatever npm alternative is popular this week. The last time I tried building an electron app, it just spit pages of dependency errors at me and I gave up.