Vlt 1.0 and Hosted Package Registries | Hacker News Reader

Vlt 1.0 and Hosted Package Registries

vlt.io

55 pointspatrikcsak20 comments

I am not sure exactly what this service is or why it is desirable. Pitch me in five seconds or less?

5s: save time & money

10s: vlt helps engineering teams build JavaScript software faster, reduce supply chain risk, and lower infrastructure costs (via. API perf / payload optimizations).

20s: If you've used npm for years & are just narrowly escaping the various malware attacks or are on the hook for running up CI/agent bills at work because cold installs are X percent of the time compared to your actual builds/runtime, then you should check us out.

22s: Also, <insert jFrog grumble>.

To add a bit of non-Vlt (I work on the JS Platform Team at Netflix where I have driven many of our decisions in the package manager space the past 6 years) but highly involved and supportive community member:

The team that was able to ship the most important features for npm to be competitive in the modern JS stack from ~2020 was able to take a fresh look at the problem without the organizational baggage of Github/Microsoft.

On the technical side, the ecosystem is maturing and we need a better set of foundational tools to meet that maturity level. This includes deep commitment to performance, security, and DX. The full product is more than just a package manager, it is a registry, a registry client, a task runner, and much more. Vlt is aiming to be this mature foundation.

Feel free to correct me if I am wrong on anything here Darcy.

P.S. grumble grumble...jFrog is a trash fire....grumble grumble

...can you make the 5s pitch be more like 'X times faster than pnpm and more secure' but fill X for me? unless it isn't pnpm at all in which case replace with 'it does X' because I've no idea after reading your post and a quick skim of the announcement itself?

Perf is highly nuanced but we've been doing realistic benchmarking for the ecosystem for almost a year now: https://benchmarks.vlt.sh/

We've got more improvements coming soon but we're a roughly ~10-40% faster registry then npm out-of-the-box. Compared to incumbent enterprise registries we're like ~3x.

jFrog is horrendous, so can you also tackle Python please?

Yeah but what is it?

Package registry for Javascript; like npm but your own so you can lock it down.

Can anyone from vlt explain the inconsistencies in their performance over time graph? When I compare it w/ the npm baseline, it looks like it fluctuates between being ~4s faster typically but then there are periods where the performance is worse.

I appreciate the transparency that the company has showing their performance, the early August degradation has me wondering what’s going on.

I believe most, if not all of those, were due to some variation of adding some new feature/capability to the system and then making things faster again.

This will benefit the entire ecosystem. Well done.

Appreciate the kind words! We're excited to keep supporting this ecosystem.

Over a year I joined the waitlist and almost forgot that I did. Today the registry is open to deliver on its promises—secure the supply chain.

Founder here - thanks for the vote of confidence! We've got a lot more in store.

Without identity federation via oidc it’s basically not really a replacement for verdaccio

This is coming imminently but appreciate the feedback & will push to get this landed here quickly. That said, our client does support OIDC publishing if your registry does so hopefully you'll still find value there as it's a major step up from legacy npm clients.

A little late reply:

Preferably I do not use a client on my machine to publish a package. That’s what I meant, modern registries should always support working with oidc providers to support publishing credentials from ci/cd systems. Sometimes called trusted publishing: https://repos.openssf.org/trusted-publishers-for-all-package...

The entire page doesn't even mention javascript :/

thanks for the feedback. we will update the announcement post. we at least try to make that clear on the main landing page https://www.vlt.io/home

So this is advertising as a secure npm?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com