4 ms·

Because modern web development is a friggin' minefield of browser support matrices, front-end development languages with experimental features, and aging specif

Because modern web development is a friggin' minefield of browser support matrices, front-end development languages with experimental features, and aging specifications that require the use of preprocessors for simple things like variables and functions. Almost everything in that 106 MB is a preprocessor of some type that's designed to either make developer's lives easier, normalize code to a widely-supported standard, and/or optimize said code to deliver the smallest possible bundle to end users.

mwkaufma 6y ago
Why can't it be 50mb? Why shouldn't it be 200mb?
- isochronous 6y ago
  I don't understand the point you're trying to make. That's just how much disk space those tools and their dependencies take. You might as well ask why iron is as dense as it is.
  - mwkaufma 6y ago
    Web-pack is not an elementary particle. It's a man-made construction. Describing its disk-size as an intrinsic aspect is a categorical mistake. Webpack is no-doubt a big program with a lot of features. But I have several even-bigger programs on my PC that clock in at just a few mb - so saying it has a lot of features doesn't answer OP's original question, it simply substitutes an easier question and then answers with a "the size is what the size is" tautology. When a native app links a static library, it performs dead-code elimination. It might have hundreds of megabytes of dependencies, but the overwhelming majority is not copied to the application. When I make a new rails project I don't download the text-source of Firefox or MySQL and all their downstream dependencies into every project root. There's no reason webpack has to do this, except because of arbitrary workflows imposed by NPM. If no user-complaint about NPM is ever quantified or interrogated, then NPM will fade into irrelevancy.

4 ms·

Because modern web development is a friggin' minefield of browser support matrices, front-end development languages with experimental features, and aging specif

by isochronous 6y ago

mwkaufma 6y ago
Why can't it be 50mb? Why shouldn't it be 200mb?
- isochronous 6y ago
  I don't understand the point you're trying to make. That's just how much disk space those tools and their dependencies take. You might as well ask why iron is as dense as it is.
  - mwkaufma 6y ago
    Web-pack is not an elementary particle. It's a man-made construction. Describing its disk-size as an intrinsic aspect is a categorical mistake. Webpack is no-doubt a big program with a lot of features. But I have several even-bigger programs on my PC that clock in at just a few mb - so saying it has a lot of features doesn't answer OP's original question, it simply substitutes an easier question and then answers with a "the size is what the size is" tautology. When a native app links a static library, it performs dead-code elimination. It might have hundreds of megabytes of dependencies, but the overwhelming majority is not copied to the application. When I make a new rails project I don't download the text-source of Firefox or MySQL and all their downstream dependencies into every project root. There's no reason webpack has to do this, except because of arbitrary workflows imposed by NPM. If no user-complaint about NPM is ever quantified or interrogated, then NPM will fade into irrelevancy.