I think we need to smell the coffee and review npm and scrutinize it because it is getting dangerously out of hand.
At the least, my interpretation of deno lore is that they tried to ditch npm and found this limited their adoption so significantly that they had to patch it back in. That would provide sufficient warning to me that attempting to move away from npm was unwise.
This is ridiculous and the response is entirely expected, it’s not about the code anymore, it’s about people. If you claim that doesn't matter, then I think the user response tells you otherwise. It signaled that Bun was not being transparent while asking people to trust it as a core runtime system. Why would I trust a runtime that actively would just do major changes so callously? There’s a balance between all of this. You don’t need to be as methodical as Python is now with PEPs. I think Swift got similar crap, though, nowhere as bad when it rolled out major language changes out of the blue to support Apple’s own product needs a few years back. This was kept secret and released in one burst, bypassing the entire Language Evolution process they crafted for Swift. Apple’s actions are more understandable by the nature of the company wanting to keep some things under wraps, even though it did erode trust somewhat. Apple is now a 50+ year old Fortune 100 company and Apple engineers really just kinda demurred on the bad taste it left in the community’s mouth, but at the same time, what do you expect from a company with a long history of being rather tight-lipped on major product changes. Bun has not really built this reputation nor has their parent company, but they are asking for that here and I just don’t think they have the leverage to do it.
They could have done this more methodically, made sure that the community and industry were okay with it. Maybe they actually did this more thoughtfully behind the scenes and this entirely a marketing stunt, but their lack of transparency at this moment makes it difficult to give them the benefit of the doubt. Trust is currently in short supply, burning it up on stunts like this is stupid.
Their whole point was "drop in node replacement" - instead of hitting that target they built an entire framework of tools, seemingly changing focus every month or two, and are now rewriting all that to a new language.
Points to a badly ever-shifting platform at the whims of vibes and people with more coding resources than strategic plans.
One of the responses to this announcement was Jarred asking: “What issue did you run into with the Rust rewrite? If there’s something specific I’ll fix” Dude, this is a comms problem, not a technical problem. Refusing to accept that makes the situation worse and I think it is completely believable if Bun eventually dies over this because it’s clear the folks running the show don’t understand part of the process of winning customers is to build a community where Bun is just considered the obvious choice. I remember awhile back they also forked Zig to do some “optimization” that was pointed out by Zig maintainers to be worthless. There’s a pattern developing here and it’s not a good one.
Besides, he doesn't mean he'll fix. He means "I'll let our AI vibe code a fix". We'd rather talk to the AI directly at this point, what exact value he adds?
Do you know of a better alternative for JS/TS that has all the popular packages?
Tedious, but makes the "npm hacked again" posts mostly moot.
I am building a new JS runtime called cottontail.
It’s just a prototype now but the goal is to have a huge standard library powered by native zig such that you don’t need npm.
So you’re right that npm is a disaster and I’m working on solving.
npm install pulls in my dependencies plus god knows what else at god knows how many levels. 500MB of dependencies? The dependency's dependecies are not reviewable.
I wish people would stop trying to compare NPM to PyPi and others. NPM is an unfixable disaster because of the entire mindset and ecosystem around JavaScript.