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simplicity
book

simplicity

by Dave Thomas
June 2025
Intermediate to advanced
152 pages
3h 15m
English
Pragmatic Bookshelf
Content preview from simplicity
Practice 1Cut Back on Unhealthy Dependencies

It’s late 2024. I just created a new Phoenix project using mix phx.new my_project. It had 43 dependencies, which came in at 15 MB.

A new Rails project installs 83 gems, and these in turn load hundreds more. Here’s a dependency graph of a basic Rails app.

Rails dependencies

npx create-react-app my-app downloaded 874 modules (about 350 MB of code) for a basic React app. I had time to make a cup of tea.

I’m not claiming that React is bloated compared to the others. I’m saying that they all are carrying around a lot of baggage. And these are the numbers for baseline, empty projects. As you start adding code, you’ll be adding ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9798888651704