Hacker News Reader

Comment by PunchyHamster | Hacker News Reader

Don't write anything backend or cli tool in NPM would be good start

Security by obscurity. If another language became as ubiquitous as JS then it'd be the same.

In the context of TFA, don't rely on third party github actions that you haven't vetted. Most of them aren't needed and you can do the same with a few lines of bash. Which you can also then use locally.

Other package managers are magically immune?

They are not, but npm is uniquely bad in that regard. Refusal to implement security features that would have made attacks like this harder really doesn't help https://github.com/node-forward/discussions/issues/29

The lack of a comprehensive standard library for JavaScript also results in projects pulling many more third party dependencies than you would with most other modern environments. It’s just a bigger attack surface. And if you can compromise a module used for basic functionality that you’d get out of the box elsewhere, the blast radius will be enormous.

Not to mention a culture of basically one-line packages ad infinitum. I downloaded a JS tool the other day to generate test reports and it had around 300 dependencies.

Needless to say I’m running all my JS tools in a Docker container these days.

So why hasn’t someone created a batteries include JS library? I don’t program in JS on the backend so I don’t know how feasible something like that is.

Everyone’s ideas of what batteries should be included differ

I, for one, root for AAA

*cries in ghettoblaster and Maglite D cells*

https://github.com/stdlib-js/stdlib was is one of several attempts at that, but yes the issue is that different people have very different views of what should be standard.

That doesn't seem like it should be an issue in practice? Rather than a single standard library endorsed by the language stewards if the community at large converges on a small handful of "standard" solutions that seems like it would satisfy the security aspect of things.

Lodash but also, which batteries?

You could write most of the cli tools using stdlib in python and go, without need for including hundreds of libraries even for trivial things.

yes obviously.

isn't it obvious?

it should be obvious.

why isn't obvious?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com