5 ms·

After using yarn for a week, I can't imagine going back to npm. I use npm 90% for install, and yarn does this so much better. Installs are 3-4 times faster. O

by octref 10y ago

After using yarn for a week, I can't imagine going back to npm. I use npm 90% for install, and yarn does this so much better. Installs are 3-4 times faster. Output is minimal and readable (compared to npm's wall of text that I never read). Packages are cached so I can work with slow connections in coffee shops. Sorry to be blunt, but I feel none of the release features gonna help my daily usage of npm. How about actually fixing the tab completion, which has been slow and broken forever?

scrollaway 10y ago
I'm super excited to use yarn but, just a heads up, we hit this pretty severe issue when setting it up for our projects: https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/761 https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/761
- octref 10y ago
  Yeah I wouldn't use it in production until it becomes more stable. However the team behind it seems to iterate really fast. Look at the issues fixed between public release and 0.16[0], which is only 7 days. [0]: https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/releases/tag/v0.16.0 https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/releases/tag/v0.16.0
  - amasad 10y ago
    I've been using it in production for a large app for the past week and it's been great. CI is faster, deploying is faster and dev is faster.
- Etheryte 10y ago
  Likewise, can't wait for yarn to finish its growing pains, until then it's still npm.
- po1nter 10y ago
  And if you are using npm & bower in the same project then this other issue is a show stopper https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/616 https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/616
  - ceejayoz 10y ago
    Out of curiosity, why use npm and bower in the same project?
    - joshstrange 10y ago
      Not op but I'll chime in. My team uses npm for our build tools and bower for our frontend libraries (moment, chats, lodash, etc). Our re-write only uses npm but at the time (and possibly even now) there were frontend libraries that only provide bower packages and bower seemed like the right tool for the job anyways.
      - gotofritz 10y ago
        It doesn't sound ideal having two tools that do pretty much the same thing, you are just adding a potential extra point of failure. Migrating from bower to npm is incredibly easy.
        Sacho 10y ago
        How would you migrate libraries that are only on bower, not npm?
        ceejayoz 10y ago
        How many of those are a) left and b) still maintained?
        gotofritz 10y ago
        If there are still any in 2016 it's a good sign they are not begin actively maintained
        ferentchak 10y ago
        I remember wondering this same thing myself when Bower was the the new hotness. "Don't I already have a tool that does exactly this?"
- cel1ne 10y ago
  It seem to ignore shrinkwrapped packages as well: https://medium.com/@boennemann/avoid-yarn-for-packages-and-fully-enjoy-its-benefits-for-application-development-8bdd4deb33cf#.q44b7arec https://medium.com/@boennemann/avoid-yarn-for-packages-and-f...
- vonklaus 10y ago
  It looks like they want to just eat bower. Tbh, if webpack or browserify can eat a tooling & dev stack, and yarn can eat bower and do package management, it would be a nice workflow. I wouldn't want 1 tool to rule them all, but a single tooling/dev/task kit and a single dependency/pckg manager would be nice.
raindev 10y ago
I went to DuckDuckGo to check out what yarn is. The front page makes no mention of JavaScript at all (at least on mobile). Accordingly to DuckDuckGo the whole site mentions "JavaScript" only three times. The same is true about the GitHub readme: no mentions of JavaScript at all. Before praising something, makes sense to tell people what it is. /rant Thanks for the highlight, I use npm solely for global installs, will give yarn a try.
- Hbthegreat 10y ago
  Yarn has been the talk of the dev world for the last week man. It had a large upswing on both here and reddit.
  - raindev 10y ago
    Not everyone reads news all the time.
- Kiro 10y ago
  > Before praising something, makes sense to tell people what it is. I don't know where you've been but anyone who is even remotely invested in the npm ecosystem probably knows what Yarn is at this point.
  - sametmax 10y ago
    This is irrelevant. You may be just a new comer, or not a professional developer, and still want to use yarn. A clear website seems a basic requirement to me for any project.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      >A clear website seems a basic requirement to me for any project. Well, you can't always depend on that, and in the end of the day, nothing beats actually researching and asking around. The GNU tools have some of the worst webpages -- and yet they are some of the most useful, and commonly used, packages.
lucaspiller 10y ago
Except now there's another competing standard in the JavaScript world. How long until a feature is added to Yarn and not NPM or vice versa, and a package only works in one of them? I don't mean to be rude, but your last paragraph comes across a bit strange, it sounds like you have a sense of entitlement to having NPM work the way you want. The project is open source, you can fix it, send a pull request, and the whole community will benefit. I wonder if it would have been better if the Yarn developers would had done the same.
- klodolph 10y ago
  I don't agree with the whole "it's open source, so if you don't fix it yourself you're just being entitled". 1. We have a finite amount of time each week just like everyone else. Fixing a problem with an open source project might consume a couple weeks of free time just for a tiny bug fix, because of the time it takes to learn a new code base, get tests running, and other administrative details. Larger fixes might consume an entire year. 2. Sometimes, problems are design flaws and can't really be made into pull requests. I have a strong suspicion that some of the problems with NPM fall into this camp, based on my personal experiences with NPM and how badly it performs some of its basic tasks relative to the project's age and maturity. I'm going to flip this around, so please forgive if this seems trite, but it sounds like you have a sense of entitlement yourself. Users do not "owe" the projects they use pull requests just because it's possible. Users have their own goals and motivations, and if a competing program is simply better than the program you like (from some users' perspective) it's absurd to blame the users for it. (I mean, from personal experience NPM is an astoundingly poor package manager. I've had it OOM on me on VMs for the most basic of tasks, and some commands are completely unusable.)
  - lucaspiller 10y ago
    Your argument is valid, but I think you misunderstood my point. I'm not saying that you have to fix it, just that you can. And you/we should take advantage of that. We as developers can work together on open source projects, and make them better for everyone. It's not like closed source software where the choices are a) use a competing product or b) write our own. And by work I don't mean just writing code: writing documentation and even reporting issues is just as valuable. It seems to me that the JavaScript community is very quick to say "this is s..t, I can do better!" and throw away all the work someone has done and reimplement it from scratch. Sometimes developers take criticism very badly, so I agree it isn't always an possible to say "how about you try this", and I agree sometimes the code is beyond saving and it is better just to start afresh. But as someone who is mainly an outsider to the community, it seems like there is very much an epidemic of NIH syndrome, and people aren't even willing to try contributing. Maybe you are right about my sense of entitlement, but I do truly believe if we would work together more and be less self-centred, society would benefit greatly from it.
otar 10y ago
Yarn may be something worth investing time in, but in the announcement blog post I found this part exceedingly ridiculous: "The easiest way to get started is to run: npm install -g yarn"
- steveklabnik 10y ago
  They also have binaries you can install without npm, however, it's extremely likely that their target audience already has npm installed, so that is indeed the easiest. (Also, something something "easy_install pip" or "gem install bundler")
- cr3ative 10y ago
  It's a drop-in replacement for an audience who almost certainly have npm already. Path of least resistance for your audience is where you should be.

by octref 10y ago

scrollaway 10y ago

I'm super excited to use yarn but, just a heads up, we hit this pretty severe issue when setting it up for our projects: https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/761 https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/761

octref 10y ago
Yeah I wouldn't use it in production until it becomes more stable. However the team behind it seems to iterate really fast. Look at the issues fixed between public release and 0.16[0], which is only 7 days. [0]: https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/releases/tag/v0.16.0 https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/releases/tag/v0.16.0
- amasad 10y ago
  I've been using it in production for a large app for the past week and it's been great. CI is faster, deploying is faster and dev is faster.
Etheryte 10y ago
Likewise, can't wait for yarn to finish its growing pains, until then it's still npm.
po1nter 10y ago
And if you are using npm & bower in the same project then this other issue is a show stopper https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/616 https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/616
- ceejayoz 10y ago
  Out of curiosity, why use npm and bower in the same project?
  - joshstrange 10y ago
    Not op but I'll chime in. My team uses npm for our build tools and bower for our frontend libraries (moment, chats, lodash, etc). Our re-write only uses npm but at the time (and possibly even now) there were frontend libraries that only provide bower packages and bower seemed like the right tool for the job anyways.
    - gotofritz 10y ago
      It doesn't sound ideal having two tools that do pretty much the same thing, you are just adding a potential extra point of failure. Migrating from bower to npm is incredibly easy.
      - Sacho 10y ago
        How would you migrate libraries that are only on bower, not npm?
        ceejayoz 10y ago
        How many of those are a) left and b) still maintained?
        gotofritz 10y ago
        If there are still any in 2016 it's a good sign they are not begin actively maintained
      - ferentchak 10y ago
        I remember wondering this same thing myself when Bower was the the new hotness. "Don't I already have a tool that does exactly this?"
cel1ne 10y ago
It seem to ignore shrinkwrapped packages as well: https://medium.com/@boennemann/avoid-yarn-for-packages-and-fully-enjoy-its-benefits-for-application-development-8bdd4deb33cf#.q44b7arec https://medium.com/@boennemann/avoid-yarn-for-packages-and-f...
vonklaus 10y ago
It looks like they want to just eat bower. Tbh, if webpack or browserify can eat a tooling & dev stack, and yarn can eat bower and do package management, it would be a nice workflow. I wouldn't want 1 tool to rule them all, but a single tooling/dev/task kit and a single dependency/pckg manager would be nice.

raindev 10y ago

I went to DuckDuckGo to check out what yarn is. The front page makes no mention of JavaScript at all (at least on mobile). Accordingly to DuckDuckGo the whole site mentions "JavaScript" only three times. The same is true about the GitHub readme: no mentions of JavaScript at all. Before praising something, makes sense to tell people what it is. /rant Thanks for the highlight, I use npm solely for global installs, will give yarn a try.

Hbthegreat 10y ago
Yarn has been the talk of the dev world for the last week man. It had a large upswing on both here and reddit.
- raindev 10y ago
  Not everyone reads news all the time.
Kiro 10y ago
> Before praising something, makes sense to tell people what it is. I don't know where you've been but anyone who is even remotely invested in the npm ecosystem probably knows what Yarn is at this point.
- sametmax 10y ago
  This is irrelevant. You may be just a new comer, or not a professional developer, and still want to use yarn. A clear website seems a basic requirement to me for any project.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >A clear website seems a basic requirement to me for any project. Well, you can't always depend on that, and in the end of the day, nothing beats actually researching and asking around. The GNU tools have some of the worst webpages -- and yet they are some of the most useful, and commonly used, packages.

lucaspiller 10y ago

Except now there's another competing standard in the JavaScript world. How long until a feature is added to Yarn and not NPM or vice versa, and a package only works in one of them? I don't mean to be rude, but your last paragraph comes across a bit strange, it sounds like you have a sense of entitlement to having NPM work the way you want. The project is open source, you can fix it, send a pull request, and the whole community will benefit. I wonder if it would have been better if the Yarn developers would had done the same.

klodolph 10y ago
I don't agree with the whole "it's open source, so if you don't fix it yourself you're just being entitled". 1. We have a finite amount of time each week just like everyone else. Fixing a problem with an open source project might consume a couple weeks of free time just for a tiny bug fix, because of the time it takes to learn a new code base, get tests running, and other administrative details. Larger fixes might consume an entire year. 2. Sometimes, problems are design flaws and can't really be made into pull requests. I have a strong suspicion that some of the problems with NPM fall into this camp, based on my personal experiences with NPM and how badly it performs some of its basic tasks relative to the project's age and maturity. I'm going to flip this around, so please forgive if this seems trite, but it sounds like you have a sense of entitlement yourself. Users do not "owe" the projects they use pull requests just because it's possible. Users have their own goals and motivations, and if a competing program is simply better than the program you like (from some users' perspective) it's absurd to blame the users for it. (I mean, from personal experience NPM is an astoundingly poor package manager. I've had it OOM on me on VMs for the most basic of tasks, and some commands are completely unusable.)
- lucaspiller 10y ago
  Your argument is valid, but I think you misunderstood my point. I'm not saying that you have to fix it, just that you can. And you/we should take advantage of that. We as developers can work together on open source projects, and make them better for everyone. It's not like closed source software where the choices are a) use a competing product or b) write our own. And by work I don't mean just writing code: writing documentation and even reporting issues is just as valuable. It seems to me that the JavaScript community is very quick to say "this is s..t, I can do better!" and throw away all the work someone has done and reimplement it from scratch. Sometimes developers take criticism very badly, so I agree it isn't always an possible to say "how about you try this", and I agree sometimes the code is beyond saving and it is better just to start afresh. But as someone who is mainly an outsider to the community, it seems like there is very much an epidemic of NIH syndrome, and people aren't even willing to try contributing. Maybe you are right about my sense of entitlement, but I do truly believe if we would work together more and be less self-centred, society would benefit greatly from it.

otar 10y ago

Yarn may be something worth investing time in, but in the announcement blog post I found this part exceedingly ridiculous: "The easiest way to get started is to run: npm install -g yarn"

steveklabnik 10y ago
They also have binaries you can install without npm, however, it's extremely likely that their target audience already has npm installed, so that is indeed the easiest. (Also, something something "easy_install pip" or "gem install bundler")
cr3ative 10y ago
It's a drop-in replacement for an audience who almost certainly have npm already. Path of least resistance for your audience is where you should be.