[stathibus]

A common refrain here seems to be that there is no good std lib, which makes sense for something like "chalk" (used for pretty printing?)

That being said, let's take color printing in terminal as an example. In any sane environment how complicated would that package have to be, and how much work would you expect it to take to maintain? To me the answer is "not much" and "basically never." There are pretty-print libraries for OS terminals written in compiled languages from 25 years ago that still work just fine.

So, what else is wrong with javascript dev where something as simple as coloring console text has 32 releases and 58 github contributors?

[paulddraper]

> So, what else is wrong with javascript dev where something as simple as coloring console text has 32 releases and 58 github contributors?

I see a new CLI graphics library on HN every other week.

https://github.com/fatih/color (Go) has 23 releases and 39 contributors.

https://github.com/BurntSushi/termcolor (Rust) has 173 contributors.

[crabmusket]

Skimming chalk's releases page, I did find some quick confirmation of what I expected: recent releases, at least breaking ones, are to do with keeping up with ecosystem changes:

https://github.com/chalk/chalk/releases

5.0: moving to ESM

4.0: dropping support for Node <10

3.0: indeed some substantive API and functionality changes

I got to 2.0 which added truecolor support. I was amused to note also that 3.0 and 2.0 come with splashy banner images in their GitHub releases

This is a pattern I've seen often with "connector" packages, e.g. "glue library X into framework Y". They get like 10 major versions just because they have to keep updating major versions of X and Y they are compatible with, or do some other ecosystem maintenance.