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Comment by Twirrim | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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.

It's also not a new problem.

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

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)

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

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

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