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Saying you're used by millions when you're a javascript library is a bit disingenuous. It's not like whoever happens to hit a website using your scripts is a us

Saying you're used by millions when you're a javascript library is a bit disingenuous. It's not like whoever happens to hit a website using your scripts is a user in the common sense of the word.

MrRiddle 5y ago
Babeljs has ~29 million weekly downloads via npm. If users counted it would probably be billions.
- _pdp_ 5y ago
  Yah that includes also any random automated job too… and there are many of them.
  - matzab 5y ago
    I'd say that also counts as "using it".
  - mirekrusin 5y ago
    And doesn’t include cache hits.
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    Even if those 29 million weekly downloads were all automated it would still imply 29 million users have setup automated jobs for building software with Babel.
    - HajiraSifre 5y ago
      That does not follow. There are definitely many CI pipelines that download all packages every time they're triggered. For those pipelines you'd be looking at tens of installs per day (or more).
    - physicsguy 5y ago
      No it doesn't. For e.g. how many stupid CI pipelines are set up to download it on every run? You could easily be 2 or 3 orders of magnitude out on actual number of direct users.
timkam 5y ago
They have more than 20 million weekly downloads on npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@babel/core https://www.npmjs.com/package/@babel/core, i.e., they are probably used by at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions of developers (not to speak of end-users). Of course, in the JavaScript ecosystem, the same may be true for a 20 LoC package that provides a trivial function implementation, but that's a different story.
- rplnt 5y ago
  That's not a different story, that's precisely why you can't make that assumption. Many projects would download it over and over for each commit in their CI. The package also has 14k direct dependents, making it quite likely to be downloaded more than once for each project. With this, it's not that unlikely that one company (one customers) downloads the package thousands of times a week.
  - Jweb_Guru 5y ago
    You realize that a project with 14k direct dependents is obviously hugely widely used, right? And that's not even considering that the intended usage of babel is for compiling end applications (many of which are not open source), not libraries; this is likely undercounting the number of "real" projects using it by several orders of magnitude.
    - rplnt 5y ago
      I'm not arguing that it's not widely used. Just that you can't do XX million downloads equals X million users.
  - timkam 5y ago
    If you only look at the numbers it's the same story, but with some knowledge of the JavaScript ecosystem, it's arguably unreasonable to claim that babel is just a random, trivial package that is pulled in as an arbitrary dependency.
JokerDan 5y ago
Possibly, but at the same time I am fully aware that babel is used in almost all of the frontend nodejs projects I have been involved with. It isn't something hidden away, it's something you set up for a new project or likely see/configure a little from a templated/skeleton project. So even from a development point of view, not an end user, I don't think its a far stretch to 'being used by millions of developers, and they know it is being used'.
franciscop 5y ago
They explain in the article that they get downloaded 117 millions of times per month from npm. When someone visits a website they don't download libraries from npm, those download numbers come from developers and build scripts but not from users. So while it can be argued that a percentage of those 117M/month are on automated scripts, even with a very conservative number saying of 1% of them being genuine installs this still leaves them at millions of installs per year. So yes, it's definitely not disingenuous to say it's used by millions.
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Cthulhu_ 5y ago
The fact you're calling it a JS library embedded in a web page already shows you don't actually know (and probably don't care) what Babel is.

Saying you're used by millions when you're a javascript library is a bit disingenuous. It's not like whoever happens to hit a website using your scripts is a user in the common sense of the word.

MrRiddle 5y ago

Babeljs has ~29 million weekly downloads via npm. If users counted it would probably be billions.

_pdp_ 5y ago
Yah that includes also any random automated job too… and there are many of them.
- matzab 5y ago
  I'd say that also counts as "using it".
- mirekrusin 5y ago
  And doesn’t include cache hits.
- alpaca128 5y ago
  Even if those 29 million weekly downloads were all automated it would still imply 29 million users have setup automated jobs for building software with Babel.
  - HajiraSifre 5y ago
    That does not follow. There are definitely many CI pipelines that download all packages every time they're triggered. For those pipelines you'd be looking at tens of installs per day (or more).
  - physicsguy 5y ago
    No it doesn't. For e.g. how many stupid CI pipelines are set up to download it on every run? You could easily be 2 or 3 orders of magnitude out on actual number of direct users.

timkam 5y ago

They have more than 20 million weekly downloads on npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@babel/core https://www.npmjs.com/package/@babel/core, i.e., they are probably used by at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions of developers (not to speak of end-users). Of course, in the JavaScript ecosystem, the same may be true for a 20 LoC package that provides a trivial function implementation, but that's a different story.

rplnt 5y ago
That's not a different story, that's precisely why you can't make that assumption. Many projects would download it over and over for each commit in their CI. The package also has 14k direct dependents, making it quite likely to be downloaded more than once for each project. With this, it's not that unlikely that one company (one customers) downloads the package thousands of times a week.
- Jweb_Guru 5y ago
  You realize that a project with 14k direct dependents is obviously hugely widely used, right? And that's not even considering that the intended usage of babel is for compiling end applications (many of which are not open source), not libraries; this is likely undercounting the number of "real" projects using it by several orders of magnitude.
  - rplnt 5y ago
    I'm not arguing that it's not widely used. Just that you can't do XX million downloads equals X million users.
- timkam 5y ago
  If you only look at the numbers it's the same story, but with some knowledge of the JavaScript ecosystem, it's arguably unreasonable to claim that babel is just a random, trivial package that is pulled in as an arbitrary dependency.

JokerDan 5y ago

Possibly, but at the same time I am fully aware that babel is used in almost all of the frontend nodejs projects I have been involved with. It isn't something hidden away, it's something you set up for a new project or likely see/configure a little from a templated/skeleton project. So even from a development point of view, not an end user, I don't think its a far stretch to 'being used by millions of developers, and they know it is being used'.

franciscop 5y ago

They explain in the article that they get downloaded 117 millions of times per month from npm. When someone visits a website they don't download libraries from npm, those download numbers come from developers and build scripts but not from users. So while it can be argued that a percentage of those 117M/month are on automated scripts, even with a very conservative number saying of 1% of them being genuine installs this still leaves them at millions of installs per year. So yes, it's definitely not disingenuous to say it's used by millions.

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Cthulhu_ 5y ago

The fact you're calling it a JS library embedded in a web page already shows you don't actually know (and probably don't care) what Babel is.