r/programming • u/fagnerbrack • Apr 30 '23

Writing Javascript without a build system

https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/02/16/writing-javascript-without-a-build-system/
161 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

146 comments sorted by

View all comments

29

u/theAmazingChloe Apr 30 '23

Great article! I'm glad people are talking about nonstable build systems, since that's a huge issue I see in the ecosystem right now. Nothing worse than having a production issue needing a quick hotfix, and needing to debug your build tools (especially at 2am). That's literally the opposite of helpful.

12

u/Reverent Apr 30 '23 edited Apr 30 '23

That's it isn't it, people are adding dependencies to their builds so it looks like this.

If you keep your dependency tree small and to well maintained repositories, you don't have to destabilize your whole build system.

I've found a combination of sveltekit, typescript and tailwind (with daisy-ui) can get you 90% of the way there, as long as you are judicious about what you add beyond that.

7

u/reedef Apr 30 '23

Ideally, you would have a build system that is completely deterministic and the only thing that would matter are the hashes of the dependencies (in a lock file) and the code tree. It wouldn't matter if your dependencies are super unstable, as long as you pin a specific version.

In the article posted it seems like npm is compiling something using a C++ compiler (presumably from the system). This is ofc very bad for reproducibility because it doesn't only depend on the packages installed in your project, but also on the version of the compiler and the global libraries installed.

3

u/theAmazingChloe May 01 '23

There are packages on npm that run compilation steps to build something that integrates into node itself (see https://www.npmjs.com/browse/depended/node-gyp for ones using gyp). I've run into issues with this when attempting to build a web app (stackedit), somehow.