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Comment by debdut | Hacker News Reader

I'm just dumbfounded that HN guys became so negative! Literally every comment is so negative :( Please guys, this guy did an awesome job, the painful slowness of npm -- I gotta endure it everyday, this guy is literally giving me a sigh of relief. I'm gonna use it over npm and even contribute if necessary.

If "written in Rust" is a clickbait, then most first page HN titles are clickbaity too otherwise why will you click on them? To me and most people, "Written in Rust" or even "Written in Go" reads like "it's fast" and that's definitely a feature!

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HN is extremely JavaScript-fatigued. Feels like all JavaScript-related novelty has been getting downvoted lately unless it's coming from a small set of "trusted" JS authorities (Next.js maintainers, Kent Dodds, etc.)

My comment was praising this person, and I got downvoted for it.

They've contributed so much work, and I think it's really cool that they're always diving in to solve problems and take a crack at alternative solutions. Mad props.

I kind of disagree, given that I wrote a comment that perhaps questioned the project somewhat. A lot of comments are pretty positive, at least of the time of this writing. I started out with "cool project". Even if I use node every day like yourself the startup time for npm commands is so fast compared to other stuff I use like transpiling typescript to javascript and the worst offender of all: Babel.

The babel transpiling takes about 5 seconds compared to the 200ms of npm scripts startup time. Since I haven't felt this pain of npm startup times myself as a pain I must be able to state that without being interpreted as negative, don't you agree?

Of course, speed increases are positive over all but this requires me to install something just to gain 200ms from whenever I run an npm command which isn't that often. I am sure there's a lot of people out there who this benefits a lot but I haven't personally experienced this is my years of doing node development.

There have been performance-focused alternatives to NPM for some time: Yarn and PNPM. They offer other benefits as well, and both have become pretty popular (Yarn moreso I believe). There are performance-focused alternatives for a lot of things in the Node/JS ecosystem. TypeScript tsc: ESBuild. Babel: SWC. NVM: Volta. All popular to varying degrees, with people happy to install them for their performance gains.

Sure, npm run isn’t my biggest bottleneck. But it’s noticeable, and becomes annoying a couple of layers of indirection deep… which isn’t that uncommon, especially in monorepos. Shaving 200ms off might not sound like much, but it really depends how often you’re taking that 200ms hit.

It's a good direction, like swc which replaces babel, webpack and esbuild, and is also written in rust. I feel all these parts needs to be done in a language like rust, not just some parts. I wish the whole "npm install" thingy aka the package manager which is painfully slow, needs to be written in Rust next. That would be awesome!

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