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Comment by chrismonsanto | Hacker News Reader

> What? How have you not heard of CPAN? There is not a single language in the world that can touch Perl's libraries.

That's a really outdated meme. CPAN is small, pretty much every language you hear about regularly has a larger package space than CPAN. Even Go's package space is bigger than CPAN's. JS and Java each have package spaces roughly 3x CPAN's size.

http://www.modulecounts.com/

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CPAN is much higher quality, though. For every Perl package that works and has unit tests and documentation, there are 10 node packages someone tried for a month to write, then gave up and left at 0.01 with no docs. Perl isn't sexy, but Perl diehards have written and published modules to do everything you can imagine.

The http://www.modulecounts.com/ site counts the number of distributions on CPAN, which probably is the closest measure for comparisons with number of projects given on PyPI, RubyGems, etc.

However GoDoc seems to be showing number of package namespaces. If so this would be more comparable to the module count on CPAN (see http://www.cpan.org/)

So at this point in time we have:

  GoDoc:         36,497
  CPAN dists:    30,216 
  CPAN modules: 137,603

https://metacpan.org/recent

There are a couple of CPAN module installers, and every one of them, by default, will not install the target module if there are any test failures.

Honest question: are there any other languages that do that? I last looked a few years ago, and it didn't seem to be the case.

Maven will not, by default, allow you to perform a release if there are any test failures. That seems like a better model, at least for a VM language - if something works on the release machine and not on the user's machine, you have bigger problems.

That's great to hear!

I'm not too strong on Java; does what you're saying imply that some/all/most of the freely available Java 'modules' or 'packages' that are built with Maven will end up running and passing associated test suites in most all of the organizations that end up using the code in question?

No, the tests are run as part of the deploy. So before deploying a library, if the tests don't pass, the deploy fails.

However, the artifact that actually gets deployed is a .jar file containing .class files. Users of libraries don't rebuild the libraries.

Just to clarify, "deploy" in this sense means "upload to your organization's maven repository (or maven central)".

Ok cool, I understand.

So would you guess there'd be wide-spread 'deploy-time' test coverage across the Java ecosystem?

Thanks again!

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