3 ms·

An npm like ecosystem sounds absolutely horrible. It’s also not what I thought you were talking about. Many (most?) software engineers (most?) cringe at the st

An npm like ecosystem sounds absolutely horrible. It’s also not what I thought you were talking about. Many (most?) software engineers (most?) cringe at the state of the npm ecosystem—even if they hold their nose and participate in it. I definitely wouldn’t consider that an improvement to the state of game dev software engineering practices.

skohan 5y ago
I think there are some problems with package managers, and with the culture around NPM in particular, but I think almost everyone would agree that simple and standardized code reuse has been a massive boon to software engineering as a whole. Do you dislike cargo as well or just npm for some reason?
- learc83 5y ago
  It's more a question about degree. I don't mind an app having a few well vetted external dependencies. When it becomes common and accepted for a small application to contain thousands of 3rd party dependencies, I think we've gone way too far. I've worked in languages that had large standard libraries where it was common to only include a few large commercial external dependencies, and I've worked with javascript and ruby on the other end of the spectrum. I don't think one style has a clear productivity advantage over the other. Other than maybe at the very lowest levels of beginning software engineers (even then I'm unsure because of the decision paralysis common for beginners in these ecosystems). As to the original point, however, Unity and other engines already have package managers and asset/code stores. What you're essentially asking for is for Unity to remove many of the features they already include and pull them out into packages. Now you're running up against many of the organizational issues I've already talked about. Not saying it's impossible, in my experience it's just not likely to work out long term.

3 ms·

An npm like ecosystem sounds absolutely horrible. It’s also not what I thought you were talking about. Many (most?) software engineers (most?) cringe at the st

by learc83 5y ago

skohan 5y ago
I think there are some problems with package managers, and with the culture around NPM in particular, but I think almost everyone would agree that simple and standardized code reuse has been a massive boon to software engineering as a whole. Do you dislike cargo as well or just npm for some reason?
- learc83 5y ago
  It's more a question about degree. I don't mind an app having a few well vetted external dependencies. When it becomes common and accepted for a small application to contain thousands of 3rd party dependencies, I think we've gone way too far. I've worked in languages that had large standard libraries where it was common to only include a few large commercial external dependencies, and I've worked with javascript and ruby on the other end of the spectrum. I don't think one style has a clear productivity advantage over the other. Other than maybe at the very lowest levels of beginning software engineers (even then I'm unsure because of the decision paralysis common for beginners in these ecosystems). As to the original point, however, Unity and other engines already have package managers and asset/code stores. What you're essentially asking for is for Unity to remove many of the features they already include and pull them out into packages. Now you're running up against many of the organizational issues I've already talked about. Not saying it's impossible, in my experience it's just not likely to work out long term.