Hacker News Reader

Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

This seems too little too late. Yarn is fast, stable, efficient, and (most importantly) reliable in getting things done. Doubtful anyone using yarn would switch back at this point.

View on HN

Meh; unless you're doing something really complex or ran into an odd bug, npm is fine and so is yarn. They're both fast and stable enough and they both do _basically_ the same thing.

I don't understand the turf war; the node module ecosystem is incredibly shitty (good luck running any modern framework without pulling in hundreds of dependencies) and these two tools do basically the same thing. Just use whichever one works ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

YMMV but in my experience npm would break consistently doing the most trivial of tasks. Switched to yarn and haven't once looked back.

Meh? NPM only started to get better after yarn was released so this is over several years of experience.

Yarn also solved major speed and reliability issues. I'm not sure why that keeps being glossed over but NPM often had problems with reproducible builds and generally keeping things working. Just check the top comment on this page to see the outstanding bugs.

Dude, I can't even begin to start counting how many times I have had to rm -rf the node_modules/ folder and do an npm install afresh, just because some dependency has screwed up the other.

yarn has given me peace that I did not think was possible.

    npm@6 is up to 17x faster than the npm of one year ago.

Some advice for other people doing performance tuning:

There comes a point where impressive gains cross over from a brag into an admission of guilt. The long slow is a big part of why yarn exists.

I don't remember it too clearly now but a few years ago there was a case of "One line of PHP changed and composer is now 70% faster". I'm not comparing anything, just got reminded of it.

It happens, just not usually like npm.

The worst performance bug I ever reported on a piece of software had an O(n^5) runtime. But our n was about 5x what anyone else was doing so it went from a couple minutes to all day. Luckily they found a workaround, because that was brutal.

We switched back months ago. We tried yarn for a few months and while there nothing wrong with it, after npm 5 came out there wasn’t a compelling reason to keep using it.

What was the compelling reason to switch back to npm versus yarn?

For me, the reason was, why add an extra layer when there isn't much of a reason to do so. All packages are at least tested on npm.

That's definitely a fair reason, thanks.

Everyone has NPM. A subset of them are familiar with Yarn. So it makes sense to use NPM if Yarn doesn't confer any operational advantages that you care about.

That makes sense, thanks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com