Yarn vs NPM

[silviogutierrez]

Projects created using Reactivated use Yarn Classic. When Yarn first came out, it was fast. dramatically faster than NPM. It also encouraged a lock file for deterministic builds. Finally, it had support for workspaces built-in. All while being fully compatible with the NPM ecosystem.

These days, NPM has caught up in speed. It also supports lockfiles and workspaces. More importantly, Yarn 2+ no longer aims to be a drop-in replacement for NPM.

The point of this RFC isn't to discuss the merit of Yarn 2+ features, but whether it makes sense to keep Yarn Classic as the package manager.

Pros

• It's there. It works. It's fast.
• Running scripts doesn't require yarn run <command>. You can just type yarn <command>.

Cons

• It's an additional dependency.
• Development on the "Classic" Yarn is basically done.

[stlk]

I definitely recommend moving to npm. It's completely fine now. Last thing missing was npx command. Just managed to start https://github.com/silviogutierrez/reactivated/tree/main/development without nix and yarn. Only thing I had to do was replace yarn with npx in

reactivated/reactivated/processes.py

Line 11 in eba2be2

["yarn", "tsc", "--watch", "--noEmit", "--preserveWatchOutput"],

[silviogutierrez]

I think the replacement would be npm run tsc right? npx will go and install it if it's not installed, which is not quite what we want.

[silviogutierrez]

But point taken about moving to npm over yarn

[stlk]

I think the replacement would be npm run tsc right? npx will go and install it if it's not installed, which is not quite what we want.

Just tried it to be sure. npm run tsc doesn't work. :)

• npm run is only for running scripts defined in package.json.
• npx will first look for local package and will pull it from the registry only if it's not available.

[silviogutierrez]

Oh wow, you're right. I didn't realize yarn tsc was not the same as npm run tsc.

Really, probably best to just do node_modules/.bin/tsc as I do elsewhere. Much faster.

[silviogutierrez]

Resolved by #199