Build It Yourself | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
Another day, another rant about dependencies. from me. This time I will ask you that we start and support a vibe shift when it comes to dependencies.
You're probably familiar with the concept of “dependency churn.” It's that never-ending treadmill of updates, patches, audits, and transitive dependencies that we as developers love to casually install in the name of productivity. Who doesn't enjoy waiting for yet another cargo upgrade just so you can get that fix for a bug you don't even have?
It's a plague in most ecosystems with good packaging solutions. JavaScript and Rust are particularly badly affected by that. A brand new Tokio project drags in 28 crates, a new Rocket project balloons that to 172, and a little template engine like MiniJinja can exist with just a single dependency — while its CLI variant slurps up 142.
If that doesn't sound like a big deal, let's consider terminal_size. It is a crate that does exactly what its name suggests: it figures out your terminal dimensions. The underlying APIs it uses have effectively been stable since the earliest days of computing terminals—what, 50 years or so? And yet, for one function, terminal-size manages to introduce three or four additional crates, depending on your operating system. That triggers a whole chain reaction, so you end up compiling thousands of other functions just to figure out if your terminal is 80x25 or 120x40. That crate had 26 releases. My own version of that that I have stuck away in a project from 10 years ago still works without a single update. Because shocker: nothing about figuring out terminal sizes has changed.
