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Comment by timkam | Hacker News Reader

They have more than 20 million weekly downloads on npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@babel/core, i.e., they are probably used by at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions of developers (not to speak of end-users). Of course, in the JavaScript ecosystem, the same may be true for a 20 LoC package that provides a trivial function implementation, but that's a different story.

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That's not a different story, that's precisely why you can't make that assumption. Many projects would download it over and over for each commit in their CI. The package also has 14k direct dependents, making it quite likely to be downloaded more than once for each project.

With this, it's not that unlikely that one company (one customers) downloads the package thousands of times a week.

You realize that a project with 14k direct dependents is obviously hugely widely used, right? And that's not even considering that the intended usage of babel is for compiling end applications (many of which are not open source), not libraries; this is likely undercounting the number of "real" projects using it by several orders of magnitude.

I'm not arguing that it's not widely used. Just that you can't do XX million downloads equals X million users.

If you only look at the numbers it's the same story, but with some knowledge of the JavaScript ecosystem, it's arguably unreasonable to claim that babel is just a random, trivial package that is pulled in as an arbitrary dependency.

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