Such is life in the npm world, unfortunately.
I've tried to be minimal with my dependencies while providing a rich user experience, but I'm sure we could do better still. Any dependencies in particular you'd like me to look into removing?
I've tried to be minimal with my dependencies while providing a rich user experience, but I'm sure we could do better still. Any dependencies in particular you'd like me to look into removing?
I don't really think npm is to blame in this specific case. It's merely acting as an index to a set of tarballs, e.g. the same way PyPI or crates.io do.
It would be fairer to point the blame at the ecosystem and mindset of developers of popular JavaScript libraries.
I find, anecdotally, that rather than the broad spectrum you might expect, packages tend to either have a huge number of dependencies, or very few. Meaning if you do want to slim down your project's dependencies, it's usually simply a matter of identifying the whales and substituting/eliminating them with something saner.
Take for example two of the most popular package bundlers:
- parcel: direct dependencies: 59, total dependencies: 1575
- rollup: direct dependencies: 3, total dependencies: 9
The downside is that the most popular libraries and frameworks do not really do this; babel being a particularly egregious example, but I understand why they choose that path even if it isn't the choice I would make!
Something to worry about if it ever became prevalent I guess, but doesn't seem to be rn.
Other than that, I have to commend you on the rest of your dependency management; most of the rest of your chosen dependencies have between 0 and 3 sub-dependencies.
I guess you can use packages that use minimal dependencies, and pin those to specific versions.
Maybe look to convert to a language that doesn't do this? I realise that's a tough call, though.