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> Empirically, libraries with unique names are more popular than ones that aren’t. Seems like this is survivorship bias. All of the common names get squatted b
by staticassertion 7y ago
> Empirically, libraries with unique names are more popular than ones that aren’t.
Seems like this is survivorship bias. All of the common names get squatted by people who never push code, and then anyone who's actually going to build something will need to pick something unique.
Reqwest is more popular than request, for example. It's not exactly what most would expect, and if you search "request" you get the much less popular crate.
- steveklabnik 7y agoThis is true even in ecosystems that have namespacing. And in hybrid systems, like npm’s, the non-namespaces versions are almost universally more popular than the namespaced ones.
- staticassertion 7y agoInteresting, but I wonder how this works in purely namespaced systems - if non standard names are more popular in, say, maven. I don't know. I'm unconvinced that this is a meaningful metric, and I worry more about typosquatting/ malicious dependencies, which, to my knowledge, crates.io does almost nothing to proactively deal with.
- steveklabnik 7y agoNamespacing doesn’t solve typosquatting or malicious dependencies. You typosquat the namespace instead. Any dependency can become malicious.
- staticassertion 7y agoYeah, you're right.