12
Need to know about npm
(lemmy.ml)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
12 points (92.9% liked)
Web Development
3430 readers
38 users here now
Welcome to the web development community! This is a place to post, discuss, get help about, etc. anything related to web development
What is web development?
Web development is the process of creating websites or web applications
Rules/Guidelines
- Follow the programming.dev site rules
- Keep content related to web development
- If what you're posting relates to one of the related communities, crosspost it into there to help them grow
- If youre posting an article older than two years put the year it was made in brackets after the title
Related Communities
- !html@programming.dev
- !css@programming.dev
- !uiux@programming.dev
- !a11y@programming.dev
- !react@programming.dev
- !vuejs@programming.dev
- !webassembly@programming.dev
- !javascript@programming.dev
- !typescript@programming.dev
- !nodejs@programming.dev
- !astro@programming.dev
- !angular@programming.dev
- !tauri@programming.dev
- !sveltejs@programming.dev
- !pwa@programming.dev
Wormhole
Some webdev blogs
Not sure what to post in here? Want some web development related things to read?
Heres a couple blogs that have web development related content
- https://frontendfoc.us/ - [RSS]
- https://wesbos.com/blog
- https://davidwalsh.name/ - [RSS]
- https://www.nngroup.com/articles/
- https://sia.codes/posts/ - [RSS]
- https://www.smashingmagazine.com/ - [RSS]
- https://www.bennadel.com/ - [RSS]
- https://web.dev/ - [RSS]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Finding a Webpack replacement that doesn’t use NPM at all is going to be hard, but there are certainly alternatives that don’t require the 1000+ NPM dependencies required to use Webpack.
Some alternatives you can consider are Rsbuild and Farm. Part of the reason they use so much fewer NPM dependencies is because they’re written in Rust, so they’ll have Cargo dependencies instead, but you shouldn’t notice anything of that. Of course if you want to audit everything it’s not that much easier, but at least the Cargo ecosystem seems to have avoided quite some of the mistakes that NPM made. But yes, in the end it still comes down to the extent that you trust your dependencies.
I really do enjoy that the web development community is finally getting excited about faster development tools, but...
It seems like there's a new version of the old joke about vegans.
Q: How do you know someone ~~is a vegan~~ writes code in Rust?
A: They'll tell you
I don't understand why the developers of these tools have to point out that they're written in Rust in the first few sentences about the project, as if that's the main feature? Programming language is an implementation detail, not a core feature. I don't care what language my developer tools are written in as long as they're fast.
Hehe, yeah, I actually agree in principle, although in the context of web tooling I think it’s at least understandable. For many years, web tooling was almost exclusively written in JavaScript itself, which was hailed as a feature, since it allowed JS developers to easily jump in and help improve their own tooling. And it made the stack relatively simple: All you needed was Node.js and you were good to go.
Something like the Google Closure Compiler, written in Java, was for many years better than comparable tooling written in JS, but remained in obscurity, partially because it was cumbersome to setup and people didn’t want to deal with Java.
Then the JS ecosystem ran into a wall. JS projects were becoming bigger and bigger, and the performance overhead of their homegrown tooling started frustrating more and more. That just happened to be the time that Rust came around, and it happened to tick all the boxes:
I think these things combined helped the language to quickly win the hearts and minds of many in the web community. So now we’re in a position where just name dropping “Rust” can be a way to quickly resonate with those developers, because they associate it with fast and reliable and portable. In principle you’re right, it should just be an implementation detail. But through circumstance it seems to have also become an expression of mindshare – ie. a marketing tool.