JavaScript people do not create libleftpad.so, they create libleftpad.o (metaphorically speaking), which will not clutter up your distribution, it will just clutter up some apps. I'd rather see 50 little files like libleftpad.o than 5 gigantic libraries.
But I agree with what you're saying in the second paragraph, which actually sounds just like what my GP meant by using "Webpack to throw away what isn't used". Having unused parts of larger libraries cut out would be a much cooler solution than just telling everyone to eschew kitchen sinks in favor of many tiny, bespoke items. Especially since finding the right small libraries is much harder than finding a kitchen sink that just works and has a sizable community behind it
> which will not clutter up your distribution, it will just clutter up some apps.
Not necessarily. Distributions have to build everything, and in openSUSE we have an integrated build system[1] which has a lot of very useful features (rebuild when dependencies are updated, and automated QA runs before releases). Those features require you to have all of the dependencies of a project in an RPM package. Even if you don't end up shipping that package, the package is used for tracking security issues and backports and so on. You can't pull anything from the internet during a build, you have to depend on your BuildRequires.
Now take any average JS application that has over 800 dependencies. Ruby was already bad enough with ~80 dependencies, but adding another order of magnitude is just not maintainable. One of my colleagues gave a talk at LCA about this problem[2].
I had no idea about this - thank you for bringing it up! But we seem to be discussing different ideas. I was trying to argue about apps, specifically iOS apps, like the original article was about. iOS apps aren't distributed on openSUSE, so if some devs make some kind of libleftpad.o for Objective C developers making iOS apps, I'm saying that's fine, and I doubt it would clutter up your distro because Objective C isn't exactly known for it's cross-platform adoption :)
If we're going to talk about linux packages, aren't they often written in languages with amazing optimization skills? If I write some C99 code that uses a gigantic library but I only use like 2% of it, my compiler will cut out the 98% my code doesn't use, so libleftpad sounds like an awful idea. That's one reason why packages on linux distros aren't too big.
But I'm talking about iOS apps where, as others have pointed out, the available optimizations suck[0], and as such, I think that having libleftpad.o included in everyone's iOS apps isn't a big deal (note that iOS doesn't really have a nice way to create libleftpad.so anyway AFAICT because all code for your app is supposed to be sandboxed so no one else can mess with or use it). I agree that it would be really cool to just cut out the 98% of $GIGANTIC_LIBRARY that isn't used at compile time, but since Objective C doesn't seem to have that now, I think small things would be a really nice way to give users more space on their phones without removing features.
Ah okay, I was talking about things like electron applications or desktop/server javascript projects. If you want to use $latest_js_web_framework and package it in a distribution, you're going to be in a world of pain (the same applies for Rust because their package management was based on NPM).
> I'd rather see 50 little files like libleftpad.o than 5 gigantic libraries.
And then you'll have to use software written in 50 different styles, with 50 different type and error conventions, with pieces that couple together or not at random.
> And then you'll have to use software written in 50 different styles, with 50 different type and error conventions, with pieces that couple together or not at random.
All of which matters not one hoot to folks _using_ the software.
Right, and most people could have much more free space on their phones (or, more apps). I'd much rather write some glue code than ask my users to dedicate 275 MB to install my app, not even counting cached data or anything else. There's a reason many of my friends and I have deleted apps like LinkedIn - it's not that we don't like them, it's that the the apps were too big for the little value they gave us, especially when considering the web versions give us almost all the same capabilities, and only cost a couple KB of persistent storage (cookies + history + maybe some localStorage or whatever).
But I agree with what you're saying in the second paragraph, which actually sounds just like what my GP meant by using "Webpack to throw away what isn't used". Having unused parts of larger libraries cut out would be a much cooler solution than just telling everyone to eschew kitchen sinks in favor of many tiny, bespoke items. Especially since finding the right small libraries is much harder than finding a kitchen sink that just works and has a sizable community behind it