Comment by anon7000

Lodash is a good counterpoint, but it’s falling out of style since the JS runtimes support more basic things now.

JS apps, despite the HN narrative, have a much stronger incentive to reduce bundle/“executable” size compared to most other software, because the expectation is for your web app to “download” nearly instantly for every new user. (Compare to nearly any other type of software, client or server, where that’s not an expectation.)

JS comes with exactly zero tools out of the box to make that happen. You have to go out of your way to find a modern toolchain that will properly strip out dead code and create optimized scripts that are as small as possible.

This means the “massive JS library which includes everything” also depends on having a strong toolchain for compiling code. And while may professional web projects have that, the basic script tag approach is still the default and easiest way to get started… and pulling in a massive std library through that is just a bad idea.

This baseline — the web just simply having different requirements around runtime execution — is part of where the culture comes from.

And because the web browser traditionally didn’t include enough of a standard library for making apps, there’s a strong culture of making libraries and frameworks to solve that. Compare to native apps, where there’s always an official sdk or similar for building apps, and libraries like boost are more about specific “lower level” language features (algorithms, concurrency, data structures, etc) and less about building different types of software like full-blown interactive applications and backend services.

There are attempts to solve this (Deno is probably the best example), but buy-in at a professional level requires a huge commitment to migrate and change things, so there’s a lot of momentum working against projects like that.