Ask HN: How do you choose a new library for your project?
What do you rely on? Your intuition? Docs? Examples? GitHub? Search engine? History? Blogs? Do you have any process in place?
When evaluating a library, the three big questions on my mind are, 1) is it absolutely 100% necessary, 2) Does it introduce any security concerns, 3) Is it actively maintained and licensed properly for my product license. A fourth question closely following is what dependencies does it also introduce to my system.
Many times going through code bases I have seen an entire library included for 1 method that could easily be replicated in code. Yes, creating your own method comes at a cost but frankly including a library and dependency is generally a larger cost over time.
I have also seen libraries included into code bases where the last update to the library was 4 years ago and it is all but dead. Sure 10k projects use it cause they included it 4 years ago but that doesn't mean it is stable, maintained and secure today. And if a library is so simple it doesn't have to be touched for 4 years, then likely I don't need to be including it from a third party (but I could see exceptions).
Lastly, license type matters a ton, developers don't think about it, but including the wrong type of open source library into a closed paid product can be a major pain and these things have to be thought out carefully to keep the company out of trouble.
I've seen this too. Initially, I thought it was an internal joke.
Lastly, license type matters a ton,
Probably more of a concern for established companies, startups usually don't pay much attention to this.
A fourth question closely following is what dependencies does it also introduce to my system.
This could be very time consuming for dependancy-rich libraries. At least license types can be auto inspected with a recursive tool. Dispelling security concerns would require some serious auditing.
Other than that, I try to pick the simplest library that does what I want. I do mean simplest as in "easiest to use", not necessarily as in "most minimal", though the two tend to correlate to some extent.