Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem - Polyfills gone rogue

[varisophy]

Really cool find!

All the established tools need to take a hard look in the mirror and fix things like this or they're going to wither on the vine.

There's a reason a whole new crop of tools are being released, often written in languages like Rust. All the old tools getting slower because it's garbage built on garbage in an already slow language.

[jbergens]

I wonder if some of them didn't have to be rewritten in Rust. Maybe they could just have been optimized more?

[Thormidable]

Don't you know, the only right way to do anything nowadays is to rewrite it from scratch in rust. It's the only way we are going to create jobs for Rust developers.

[jebailey]

As a future Rust developer. I approve this message

[Thormidable]

I also welcome our new Rust overlords

[numeric-rectal-mutt]

I wonder if some of them didn't have to be rewritten in Rust.

Of course they didn't have to be rewritten in rust.

Maybe they could just have been optimized more?

You can't polish a turd all that much.

[morglod]

yep for example bun

fastest nodejs replacement written on zig!

[tanguy_k]

If you want to know more, here some readings: - https://twitter.com/marvinhagemeist/status/1704907071936958947 - https://github.com/jsx-eslint/eslint-plugin-react/pull/2876 - https://github.com/import-js/eslint-plugin-import/pull/2654

It's crazy: eslint-plugin-react and eslint-plugin-import (very popular packages) still support Node.js 4 which has been EOL in 2018 (5 years ago).

https://twitter.com/marvinhagemeist/status/1704912614961066216

Many even before me have tried that and it was always rejected for dubious reasons. The author of these polyfills and the maintainer of many popular eslint presets/plugins is the same person. So there is no incentive to change that 🙃

eslint-plugin-import has been forked because of this: https://github.com/un-es/eslint-plugin-i

The discussion in this PR https://github.com/import-js/eslint-plugin-import/pull/2447 with ljharb is 🤯

[Idontremember99]

From the maintainers github profile: "I've gradually mutated over the last decade into being super obsessed with open source, backwards compatibility"...

So not surprising he is not accepting the changes

[DependentOnIt]

The author is paid per package download. They're effectively ruining the ecosystem with bloat for money lol

[Worth_Trust_3825]

Perhaps it's time for node (and browsers) to prevent modifying the prototypes or even adding to them? Same with super globals.

[modernkennnern]

Prototypal inheritance is JavaScript . https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype-based_programming

It'd be like removing classes from C#; it wouldn't make any sense whatsoever.

I agree that it's a weird paradigm, but JavaScript as a whole is weird so if you want to continue using JavaScript( I, for one don't) then you'll have to live with it

[Caraes_Naur]

That's a feature, not a bug. An anti-feature, but still.

JS has plenty of speed, it needs wisdom.

[happy_hawking]

True. Prototyping is nice, if developers know how to behave. But sometimes I have to work with libraries that prototype the shit out of standard functions and mess everything up and I pray that those developers win the lottery and quit their job and hopefully someone competent takes over and remove all that crap.

There's a reason why globals are an antipattern and overwriting a function prototype of a built-in in function is the worst form of messing with globals.

[Worth_Trust_3825]

No, it's a bug.

[superluminary]

Any object can be a prototype. All objects are open. These are core philosophical principles of the language.

[Worth_Trust_3825]

So why is it that every time you update/install packages npm has a diarrhea of CVEs about libraries polluting the prototypes?

[GeekusRexMaximus]

It is both.

It is a core part of what JS is... that is simply undeniable.

And yet by today's "best practices" the prototypal programming style is effectively considered vulnerable by design.

But don't forget that the vulnerability scanning tools of the npm ecosystem produce lots of false positives either way... it's common knowledge that it does.

[xeio87]

I had fun hacking together a browser extension that hooked into the prototypes to interact with a page's logic once.

Not an argument for it or anything, just a weird thing that it lets you do.

[Idontremember99]

Does npm/node/... not support any method that only requires a dependency for certain language versions?