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Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

create-react-app contains over 1000 packages. How long would it take to review all of those?

This sort of cavalier attitude where 1000 dependencies are yawn-inducing in their commonality is why I feel vindicated in never having wasted my time with this kind of ecosystem. Eventually the house of cards will come down. Let's all pray that it happens sooner rather than later.

I suspect that over time there will be more pushback against dependencies, as I've seen in other communities, viewing dependencies as liabilities carefully chosen.

When WebAssembly gets direct DOM access we'll finally have options and we'll no longer have to tolerate JavaScript. I expect the JS community will settle down and get somewhat saner after that, too.

Too long. Therefor create-react-app is not useable for anything other than toy or hobby projects.

This.

The problem isn't reading 1000+ dependencies, the problem is the 1000+ dependencies... There's no way, setting up a view renderer, in the context of a webpage, requires a 1000+ dependencies. I honestly did this exact thing with `create-react-app` and it's one of the reasons why I don't use/choose react. Too much bloat for no batteries included.

You're right there's no way. CRA isn't React. You can still use React by just adding react and react-dom to a page via two script tags.

this doesn't make any sense. cra is webpack, but in a way that doesn't blow up every week. you can use react without bundlers, but what is the point. you'll be sitting there, without a dev env, no hot reload, no module resolution, minification, types, jsx, babel, ... any single one of these will get you 1000+ packages on the dev side. none of this is going into the published build of course.

There are alternatives to create-react-app.

In fact, there are alternatives to React.

Have fun telling that to your boss

I rarely justify technical decisions to my boss, and when I do, they smile and nod.

I work in a similar environment, but I think it's fair to realize many do not.

Same. My boss doesn't micromanage technical decisions.

Wouldn't work there otherwise.

Or the 25 people you work with across 4-8 different teams that finally settled on something that can allow people of different teams to move around without a lot of anguish.

Plus, pick the consensus option, any problems that come up are that option's fault. Fight for anything else, and everything's your fault. Even if it is actually better it can make you, personally, look worse.

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"

Of course - this issue isn't unique to create-react-app or React, most Javascript frameworks have a similar explosion of dependencies.

A quick check of angular-cli and vue-cli shows that an empty project uses 870 and 816 dependencies respectively.

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