Hacker News Reader

Comment by haneefmubarak | Hacker News Reader

> relying on node.js

When did people start hating node and what do they have against it?

For Zed specifically? It cuts directly against their stated goal of being fast and resource-light. Moreover, it is not acceptable for software I use to automatically download and run third-party software without asking me.

For node.js in general? The language isn't even considered good in the browser, for which it was invented. It is absolutely insane to then try to turn it into a standalone programming language. There are so many better options available, use one of them! Reusing a crappy tool just because it's what you know is a mark of very poor craftsmanship.

> When did people start hating node

You're kidding, right?

Maybe they've just never seen a dependency they didn't like.

It shouldn't be as tightly integrated into the editor as it is. Zed uses it for a lot of things, including to install various language servers and other things via NPM, which is just nasty.

You might not be old enough to remember how much everyone hated JavaScript initially - just as an in-browser language. Then suddenly it's a standalone programming language too? WTH??

I assume that's where a lot of the hate comes from. Note that's not my opinion, just wondering if that might be why.

JavaScript is actually fine as the warts have been documented. The main issue these days is the billions of tiny packages. So many people/org to trust for every project that uses npm.

Nobody is forcing you to use the tiny packages.

The fact that the tiny packages are so popular despite their triviality is, to me, solid evidence that simply documenting the warts does not in fact make everything fine.

And I say this as someone who is generally pro having more small-but-not-tiny packages (say, on the order of a few hundred to a few thousand lines) in the Python ecosystem.

The point is that Zed's developers have chosen to include prettier, which probably transitively includes many other NPM packages.

Node and these NPM packages represent a large increase in attack surface for a relatively small benefit (namely, prettier is included in Zed so that Zed's settings.json is easier to read and edit) which makes me wonder whether Zed's devs care about security at all.

I guess some node.js based tools that are included in Zed (or its language extensions) such as ‘prettier’ don’t behave well in some environments (e.g., they constantly try to write files to /home/$USER even if that’s not your home directory). Things like that create some backlash.

Slow and ram heavy. Zed feels refreshingly snappy compared to vscode even before adding plugins. And why does desktop application need to use interpreted programming languages?

For me, upon its inception. We desperately needed unity in API design and node.js hasn't been adequate for many of us.

WinterTC has only recently been chartered in order to make strides towards specifying a unified standard library for the JS ecosystem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com