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Comment by Doctor_Fegg | Hacker News Reader

> Another nice thing: the node_modules folder for this Hello World Svelte app totals only 29MB and 242 packages

"Only".

The project I'm working on with only a couple web components using Angular already exceeded 400MB node_modules folder. Web development sometimes freak me out.

That's the compiler, not the output of the compiler.

Likewise GCC/LLVM is huge, but helloworld.bin is pretty small.

It can matter though; fwiw. I love Rust, but my "node_modules" in Rust is absolutely huge. Not a problem on Desktop, but because I am full-time Rust these days my next laptops have to have lots of storage. Gone are the days where I can have a small SSD in my laptop.

Fwiw though, even a 250MB node_modules would pale in comparison to my Rust version lol.

> I love Rust, but my "node_modules" in Rust is absolutely huge.

Why does Rust need a node_modules folder?

Keats is correct - I figured this is a JS discussion thread so rather than say my target folder, I'd use "node_modules" for familiarity. I should have probably explained that. A bit of verboseness would have saved more verbose comments haha.

It's not node_modules but it is the same concept, it's called target in Rust.

I've never heard it described like that but you're right. Interesting counter point.

Even though these are compile/build time requirements, their size ends up slowing down CI/CD process.

Our ondemand cloud build servers download the code, restore nuget packages and download node modules. Most of the build time is spent downloading. Compiling generally takes an order of magnitude less time compared to those 2 steps.

This especially effects scenarios where end-to-end testing can only be done in a staging environment due to complexity of the product.

Sounds like you need some caching. I have three large production svelte projects and the entire checkout and npm install (Cache then update) process takes three seconds on CircleCI.

How big is the source code size of GCC/LLVM? I mean node_modules often contains the full source + dist of the whole dependency chain.

The source-controlled (and somewhat out of date) folder for LLVM is about a gigabyte on my machine.

Many gigabytes

Erm, for a JS project that uses NPM packages, that really is tiny.

IME it's not uncommon to see node_modules with thousands of packages.

Do keep in mind of course that these are dev-time dependencies, they don't go into production. IMO only 30MB of build deps is pretty damn good.

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