[honkdaddy]

Searching for a package on npm is more time-consuming than writing 300 lines of code? Perhaps your app has some very specific constraints, but for a simple library like this, I have a hard time believing you could code something up on the fly faster than it would take to npm install the package in question.

[Jasper_]

I have absolutely written a diffing algorithm like this faster much than it would take to find an appropriate version on npm.

Every so often I try to reach for an npm library, only to find out that it's suboptimal, doesn't handle my edge cases, or just plain worse than the code I would have written.

The last time I tried to do this, I wanted a hash map with custom equality functions on the keys, since JS doesn't have one built-in by default. I searched for about 2 hours and didn't find a single one that actually worked (several claimed to be, but actually didn't work...)

So I wrote my own in about 100 lines. [0]

Data structures and algorithms tend to be really awful on npm.

[0] https://github.com/magcius/noclip.website/blob/master/src/Ha...

[jraph]

In the long term, having to manage all these dependencies, keeping track of incompatibility, testing updates, or worse, the lack of management, is time consuming.