This reminds me of a time I lost an argument with John-David Dalton about cleaning up/minifying lodash as an npm dependency, because when including the readme and license for every sub-library, a lodash import came to ~2.5MB at the time. This also took a lot of seeking time for disks because there were so many individual files.
The conversation started and ended at the word cache.
> This also took a lot of seeking time for disks because there were so many individual files.
The fact NPM keeps things in node_modules unzipped seems wild to me. Filesystems are not great at hundreds of thousands of little files. Some are bad, others are terrible.
Zip files are easier to store, take up less space, and CPUs are faster than disks so the decompression in memory is probably faster reading the unzipped files.
That was one of my favorite features of Yarn when I tried it - pnp mode. But since it’s not what NPM does it requires a shim that doesn’t work with all ps mage’s. Or at least didn’t a few years ago.
The conversation started and ended at the word cache.