I hope that whatever solutions we come up with to handle the too-many-dependencies problem don’t stifle people’s motivation to create and share new packages. It’s not a given that useful libraries are going to exist. Too much friction and people will just stop sharing code.
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Replying to @pcwalton
The C way of dealing with dependencies and the Node way of dealing with dependencies are extremes. I don't want to be in either. My sense is that we are heading towards the Node extreme without thinking too critically about it. Some pressure against that heading seems healthy!
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Replying to @burntsushi5
I think it is an issue that’s on a lot of people’s minds, and it is worth thinking about. I just don’t want the cure to be worse than the disease.
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Replying to @pcwalton @burntsushi5
We’re already starting to see Rust libraries advertise few dependencies, so I don’t necessarily agree that we aren’t thinking critically about the problem.
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Replying to @pcwalton
My sense is that is only a recent development, and it has only come up because people are starting to make noise about it. IMO anyway. We need to keep encouraging folks to think critically about bringing in dependencies.
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Replying to @burntsushi5
It really depends, though. In the Pathfinder library I’ve tried to avoid use of mandatory dependencies—that’s why it’s split up into so many crates so that you don’t get e.g. SVG parsing unless you need it. But the examples use tons of dependencies, because they’re examples.
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Replying to @pcwalton @burntsushi5
Rolling my own code to do basic things makes the examples worse, because the point is to illustrate how to use the library and any boilerplate is just noise. Including e.g. code to open a window on Win32 would scare potential users away. So I think dependencies are nuanced.
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Is there anyone arguing that dependencies aren't nuanced? Are we actually in disagreement here? Like, I don't get why we're debating this on twitter. It's a subtle issue. I'm trying to write a blog post on dependency selection and management. It is not small. :)
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