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by IshKebab 1546 days ago
Not sure I agree. NPM as a technology is actually pretty decent and fast. The biggest issue is that package.json doesn't allow comments. Webpack is shit. But there are good alternatives to it now - primarily esbuild.

I'd take that build system over Java's dog slow build systems any day. Just a shame about the JS ecosystem itself. Too many badly written libraries not written in Typescript (inexcusable these days) with a gazillion dependencies.
2 comments
toastal 1546 days ago
There's a lot of garbage TypeScript libraries too. I think a lot of this just comes down to size. Smaller languages tend to focus together on maintaining and contributing just one package that does the thing. TypeScript and JavaScript as lowest common denominator languages for many scenarios means there's a lot more options for better and worse. What hurts both as well is they are multi-paradigm while the broader communities are general pushing very hard into a single paradigm which necessitates more libraries and ecosystems.

Loving FP and admiring `fp-ts`'s work, I can't help but think our communities would be better off doing FP in FP languages instead of writing unergonomic and idiomatic code to much of the splintered TypeScript community. Yet, we'll writing things this way because it feels like the correct way to do software, meanwhile a bootcamper would find it incomprehensible; this same person would find an FP language more approachable because there's only one way to code it.

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kaba0 1546 days ago
How is Java’s build tool slow? The single frontend compile step is literally the slowest in a badly architected project we use, even though it goddamn deploys to wildfly!

Java literally compiles as fast as it gets, while npm chews through the same files multiple passes, and goddamn barely does anything yet takes eons of time.

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InsaneOstrich 1546 days ago
Yeah, I have no idea what that person is talking about. I'm in the same situation as you; we can compile hundreds of thousands of lines of Java code in dozens of different jars in less time than it takes for one of our frontend javascript builds to run.
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