weird

So… I recently found out that I had no space left on my SSD. When I tried to debug what was consuming my space, my projects folder were the culprit. How? I mean, I take photos, store them in RAW format, so how source code can be consuming more than my photos?

Turns out that by running rm -Rf (find -name 'node_modules'), (FISH shell) I was able to free 20gb of space!

So… let’s see how bizarre is the Javascript ecosystem in 2021.

Strangely big libraries

Sometimes, when I have to generate projects, they ask me to install yo. Yo is just a CLI to run generators – it does not include any generator. Yo occupies 89mb of space in my disk. Installing the react-webpack (manually by running npm i generator-react-webpack, because otherwise yo will try to install globally) means that your node_modules now occupies 180mb.

Let’s thing a little bit about this number: Windows XP, minimalist install without any add-on, requires 1.5gb of space. So a SINGLE GENERATOR occupies 12% of a full operating system.

So, create-react-app is more gentle – it just installs under 5.3mb. Generating a react app creates a node_modules folder with… 242mb. One of the dependencies is global-modules, that is just a single file with an if to define how to call things. It’s also only used in a single file – react-dev-utils/printHostingInstructions.js – in the folllowing code:
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