[adrusi]

This is one of the biggest sources of bloat. In the node and ruby ecosystems especially, dependencies proliferate exponentially, where an application pulls in 12 libraries, each of which pull in 12 of their own, which each pull...

Downloading the depedencies for Ghost, the node blogging platform with the explicit goal of simplicity and minimalism, takes me minutes.

Compare this with the status quo when writing programs in C, where you might link to 4 libraries total, one of which pulls in 2 others as dependencies.

I've come to suspect that the super convenient package managers that all the "modern" languages have are at fault for this.

[XorNot]

And you're giving what would be described as the exact opposite example to the parent post: why do node projects have hundreds of dependencies? Because those dependencies do exactly 1 thing most of the time (and usually pull in some other exactly 1 thing dependencies to do it).

[fullwedgewhale]

That may be true in Node, but as a counter example, in Ruby, I saw dependencies creep into projects where there would be some minor point like "I need to do X" and that's done by library Y. In addition, Gem Y does A, B, C and D. In order to do all that it drags in several dependencies which are not directly needed. When you actually look at X, you realize it's not that difficult to do yourself. So at what point should you just write the functionality yourself and at what point do you rely on external libraries (and any baggage they can bring with them.) You have to maintain that code (even if it is fairly trivial), but you then have to maintain your dependency (keeping the gem up to date, maybe making small code changes to accommodate breaking changes in the gem). It can be a real mess.