alt Hacker NewsDependency bloat and dependency bitrot have made solutions less permanent, have increased the maintenance burden. My ancient projects with zero dependencies still stand. But projects I built on shifting dependencies are rotting and cracking.
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singpolyma3 • today at 12:19 AM
Do the versions of the dependencies that you used no longer exist anywhere?
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This is why is like pure C/C++ projects with zero dependencies beyond the standard library, and this is certainly what I do for my numerical work. If some external library is needed, the source files of the dependency are downloaded, compiled, and kept as part of the project itself, so that it can always be rebuilt and reused if necessary. Of course, depending on what you do, this may not be practical, although LLMs certainly have made it much easier to generate the dependencies in house, so to speak.