I have some frontend developers in my team who think java is slow, but wait minutes waiting for NPM to finish its job. Our backend code builds 3x faster than our frontend code these days.
But is that because of npm, or is it because of their massive array of dependencies, plus webpack, bable, pollyfills and whatever 5 transpilers they have integraated into their project?
Last time I used NPM, it tended to download megabytes of dependencies for each project. If you used a package in, say, 10 different projects, you had 10 copies of it. Did they solve that issue?
It's good for isolation: i.e. in general if you copy a directory containing an NPM project to another location, in general it will just work, and deleting something elsewhere on the file system should never affect the project. In general I would argue this is a more important property for dependency managers to have rather than using the least amount of space possible.
If you really want to avoid it you can install everything as a global dependency, but it's not best practice.
This is still the case. There are some alternate package managers (pnpm, yarn) that handle this better, but they both break some tooling. In practice, I've found that it's not too big an issue—most people have plenty of disk space, and if you are running low you can just `rm -rf node_modules` on some old projects and install again next time you touch them.
1. has a nicer user experience
2. gives a lot of confidence that a project will be reproducible across environments, with only a package.json file
Cargo is pretty close, but NPM is the gold standard for dependency management as far as I'm concerned.