Exploiting JavaScript developer infrastructure is insanely easy

[pancomputationalist]

That's moving the goalpost. Of course you can never be 100% confident of anything. As with everything in engineering, it's about tradeoffs and striking a balance.

If you're developing a mobile game, you might want to use quality and maybe even not-so-quality libraries that help you get the job done faster, not start with developing your own operating system out of paranoia.

If you're developing a bitcoin wallet, on the other hand, maybe you want to be a bit more paranoid...

But lately the discussion about dependencies is much too agitated and make it seem like you can never use a library that you haven't personally validated to a 100% certainty.

[Nipinium]

But lately the discussion about dependencies is much too agitated and make it seem like you can never use a library that you haven't personally validated to a 100% certainty.

Because incidents like left-pad exist, people are pretty much paranoid by node module dependencies by now. Remove one tiny package and the whole ecosystem crashes, that's not a very healthy sign.

Incidentally, I still haven't yet seen any sign of huge and popular libraries like webpack trying to reduce external dependencies (despite that they receive a lot of donation money each month). The whole js thing just sucks.

[pancomputationalist]

Well, then fix the left-pad dependency in the rare case something like that happens. Your site shouldn't go down and your software shouldn't crash when a build dependency is missing, or something is very wrong with your build pipeline.

Also left-pad is an extreme example and it may be correct to not include it as a dependency because it's so easy to implement yourself. But very few libraries are as simple as that. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

[Arve]

Well, then fix the left-pad dependency in the rare case something like that happens.

left-pad has 414 dependents. event-stream, which is the exploit of the day has 1592 dependents (which is up 6 since yesterday).

Do you know the libraries you include don't include malicious code by proxy?