Don't they?

I just went to crates.io and picked a random newly updated crate, which happened to be pixelfix, which fixes transparent pixels in pngs.

It has six dependencies and hundreds of transient dependencies, may of which appear to be small and highly specific a la left-pad.

https://crates.io/crates/pixelfix/0.1.1/dependencies

Maybe this package isn't representative, but it feels pretty identical to the JS ecosystem.

It depends on `image` which in turn depends on a number of crates to handle different file types. If you disable all `image` features, it only has like 5 dependencies left.

And all those 5 remaining dependencies have lots of dependencies of their own. What's your point?

> What's your point?

Just defending Rust.

> 5 remaining dependencies have lots of dependencies of their own.

Mostly well-known crates like rayon, crossbeam, tracing, etc.

You cannot defend Rust if this is reality.

Any Rust project I have ever compiled pulled in over 1000 dependencies. Recently it was Zed with its >2000 dependencies.

I think it's justified for Zed. It does a lot of things.

Zed isn’t special, I doubt Sublime Text has thousands of dependencies. It’s a language/culture problem.

Edit: Ghostty is a good counter-example that is open source. https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/tree/main/pkg

Zed is closer to IntelliJ or VSCode than to Sublime Text.

In the amount of bloat, yes.

It is also important to note that this is not specific to Zed. As someone else have mentioned, it is a cultural problem. I picked Zed as an example because that is what I compiled the last time, but it is definitely not limited to Zed. There are many Rust projects that pull in over 1000 dependencies and they do much less than Zed.

Yeah tbh one time I had a Rust job and their back-end had like 700-800 dependencies.

It's not possible for a language to have an insane dependency tree. That's an attribute of a codebase.

Modern programming languages don't exist in a vacuum, they are tied to the existing codebase and libraries.

Sort of, but I don't really buy this argument. Someone could go and write the "missing JS stdlib" library that has no dependencies of its own. They could adopt release policies that reduce the risk of successful supply chain attacks. Other people could depend on it and not suffer deep dependency trees.

JS library authors in general could decide to write their own (or carefully copy-paste from libraries) utility functions for things rather than depend on a huge mess of packages. This isn't always a great path; obviously reinventing the wheel can come with its own problems.

So yes, I'd agree that the ecosystem encourages JS/TS developers to make use of the existing set of libraries and packages with deep dependency trees, but no one is holding a gun to anyone's head. There are other ways to do it.

Whatever you're trying to say, you aren't.

Maybe the language should have a standard library then.

C library is smaller than Node.js (you won’t have HTTP). What C have is much more respectable libraries. If you add libcurl or freetype to your project, it won’t pull the whole jungle with them.

What C doesn't have is an agreed-upon standard package manager. Which means that any dependency - including transitive ones! - requires some effort on behalf of the developer to add to the build. And that, in turn, puts pressure on library authors to avoid dependencies other than a few well-established libraries (like libpng or GLib),

You can add curl to a Rust project too.

But why, when reqwest is enough for 99% of cases.

Because it requires using async, and for most programs async is not worth the extra effort (plus very heavy dependency in the form of Tokio).

It requires Tokio, and believe it or not there are actual cases for non-async rust. So you can't use it in that case.

It's bloated.

This makes little sense. Any popular language with a lax package management culture will have the exact same issue, this has nothing to do with JS itself. I'm actually doing JS quasi exclusively these days, but with a completely different tool chain, and feel totally unconcerned by any of these bi-weekly NPM scandals.

Rust is working on that. It's not far behind right now, leave it a couple of years.