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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular opinion: 1GB is not a lot of data for most people in the first world.

Most people aren't living in the first world, and don't have high bandwidth / low latency connections with which to make pulling down 100s of MB of javascript a non-event.

While, yes, they can choose to just not use such tools or libraries, it also presents a fun barrier for learning.

It's also perfectly fine to not give a damn about either of the above.

I wonder what percentage of React/Angular/et c contributors live in places where 1GB isn’t a lot of data.

It's worth noting that node_modules is for project dependencies and most of it won't be included in the final assets. Many projects make use of build tools, command line utilities, testing suites and other libraries in development which don't get deployed. Even for actual app dependencies, many packages include source code, type definitions and multiple choices of builds which inflate the size of the node_modules folder but don't get used in production. So hundreds of megabytes of dependencies can easily be used to make something only a few megabytes in size.

Your point still stands of course!

It's also not a new problem.

I remember downloading a 150mb JDK overnight on dial-up for Java 2.

well usually a framework minimizes and scaffolds itself down to a few js files, css, and html; front end won't ever see the node_modules; only the backend will and that doesn't matter to the user

Most people are not living in the US. Just my target audience. It will never be a global enterprise, so who cares if people elsewhere have issues. As a developer I am not spending time on documentation translation (or any for that matter)

Um. So as someone living in not the first world, let me give some perspective. People here do not use “first world” sites. Even without the JavaScript, sending bits across the ocean just to see an image takes too long.

Everyone uses local nation sites, some of which even use languages spoken by no more than 5 million people world wide.

We aren’t the target market for the “first world” website, and that’s fine as the first world isn’t the target for any of our digital goods either.

It just feels a bit patronizing when this discussion is brought up, as no one is dying to use a random American made website. Facebook and Google are exceptions, not the rule.

I think that's a relatively popular opinion and not what people mean when they point out the size of the node_modules folder is huge.

I don't really care about bytes of my disk being used. But inodes of my filesystem are never going to be cheap. If there are so many little files in the node_modules dir that it takes ~3 minutes to run `npm install` or to `rm -r` the folder thus created, that's a bit silly.

We use shared dev VMs at work to help ensure consistency, and have actually run out of inodes several times solely because of node. The only error message you get is about disk space, so it's a really confusing situation for people who haven't seen it before.

I am in Australia, which is "first world" (I think you mean "developed") on a good day.

Over the new year, I was in an area where all power and phone communications were first limited, then cut completely. I was able to send/receive 30 megabytes of data in about 8 hours.

I understand there's always competing constraints and priorities, but shouldn't we be striving to do the best possible job?

I guess what I meant is that we should be doing a better job on bandwidth; a few hundred megabytes of deps isn’t a big deal in the scheme of ram/storage these days.

Hopefully things like Starlink will improve the situation a lot.

So, if gas was 10 cents a gallon, buy a fullsize truck?

Better: If a 64GB SSD is $20, use a 20GB OS.

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