Russ Cox, who developed the dependency/package management system for Go, writes about the problems with software dependencies. A choice excerpt:
Dependency managers now exist for essentially every programming language. [...] The arrival of this kind of fine-grained, widespread software reuse is one of the most consequential shifts in software development over the past two decades. And if we’re not more careful, it will lead to serious problems.
A package, for this discussion, is code you download from the internet. Adding a package as a dependency outsources the work of developing that code [...] to someone else on the internet, someone you often don’t know. By using that code, you are exposing your own program to all the failures and flaws in the dependency. Your program’s execution now literally depends on code downloaded from this stranger on the internet. Presented this way, it sounds incredibly unsafe. Why would anyone do this?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @04:15AM (2 children)
Why would it take you a lifetime to write a logger and an http client? Are you using an iPhone with autocorrect to code?
(Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Friday January 25 2019, @04:35AM (1 child)
Those two, won't. "What not" on the other side... I mean, look, try writing whatnots yourself and you'll see.
I don't get this one. Maybe because I never used an iPhone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Friday January 25 2019, @08:12AM
It's a reference to https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/01/24/214255 [soylentnews.org]