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by ramesh31 412 days ago
I think it's wonderful that there's a choice to use whatever package manager you like for your own personal work. But there is a special place for anyone who uses anything other than npm with a stable Node LTS for a professional project that will need to be maintained.
2 comments
chrisweekly 411 days ago
That's... absurd. PNPM is superior to NPM, with no downsides. It's a fundamentally better tool.
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silverwind 411 days ago
Well one downside is that it does not ship with node.
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alexgrover 412 days ago
There are so many examples of large companies and open source projects that have moved off of npm that I just don’t think this is true anymore. PNPM and bun are fast enough that the increase in development velocity is worth the occasional rough edge IMO.
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ramesh31 412 days ago
>PNPM and bun are fast enough that the increase in development velocity is worth the occasional rough edge IMO.

If the speed of your package manager is causing issues for developer velocity you have much bigger issues to contend with. And I categorically reject the statement that either of those are meaningully faster in any way. Maybe you can point to some specific obscure benchmarks that have slightly smaller numbers. But all of that goes out the window the second a dev is stuck with one of those "rough edges" even once. Not even to mention the lockin you've achieved on the tooling front now that your entire stack is nonstandard and reliant on a single highly specific list of dependencies to work, which may or may not even be kept in line with their node/npm counterparts.

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chrisldgk 412 days ago
Have you ever worked in a monorepo? With at least 5 apps and at least 5 packages, each with direct dependencies, devDependencies and testing libraries? The amount of packages you’ll need to download for a full dev environment can get really big really quickly, even if your end-user bundle doesn’t have many dependencies at all. I’ve worked on projects where an npm install took five minutes and a bun install took 10 seconds. In the real world this makes a big difference.
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alexgrover 412 days ago
Have you tried using them? Installing packages is way, way faster. Here’s an example of how this is meaningful to an organization, and I’ve personally experienced the same exact thing at my last 2 jobs.

https://medium.com/@chaudharyaniket16/from-14-minutes-to-45-...

To list some projects and companies that aren’t on NPM: Prettier, Next.js/Vercel, Cloudflare, Hono, Zod, Expo, Tamagui, Tailwind, the list goes on. I actually had trouble finding any major JS projects that are on NPM. These are serious, widely used packages, and they chose non-standard tooling for a reason.

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ramesh31 411 days ago
>"https://medium.com/@chaudharyaniket16/from-14-minutes-to-45-..."

The post describes moving from an old Yarn version that still suffered from the long, long fixed problem npm had with tree shaking. In fact, their inability to port to the newest Yarn version just highlights my point. Modern npm has solved all of these issues without the compatability problem.

>"Yarn v2 introduced several new features, including a different approach to managing the node_modules folder by eliminating it altogether through its Plug’n’Play mode."

And this is just complete insanity.

That aside, I can see that there's no real argument against pnpm at this point. It wouldn't be the end of the world. I just don't buy saving 20 seconds in CI as a legitimate reason for it.

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