colors.js VS proposal-built-in-modules

However, it's unlikely that the majority of users actually visit GitHub at https://github.com/Marak/colors.js to review the code, even at a high level. Most developers tend to rely on the assurance that open source software is generally safe to use.

> A new feature was added to the colors.js project for generating cool ASCII Art American Flags. Unfortunately, this feature was not bug-free and some test code slipped into the release causing issues downstream. Nobody is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes from time to time.

https://github.com/Marak/colors.js/commits/master shows 4 commits and 2 releases. Does not seem like a simple mistake

> As per our internal open-source development process, I opened an Issue in colors to track the bug as soon as it was confirmed. It happened to be a weekend [...] I tagged some other open-source developers I've worked with in the past to see if they had time to assist and closed the browser tab.

Early this month, the malicious attack on free-to-use libraries, namely color.js and faker.js, created a real uproar in the development community. These tools are used in thousands of projects and their downloading rate from npm is estimated in millions per week. To everyone’s surprise, it turned out to be an inside job. Marak Squires, the creator of these libraries, intentionally committed malicious code to his projects and published updated codebases on GitHub and npm. It is said that this sabotage was caused by unsuccessful attempts of Mr. Squires to monetize his projects. Fortunately, malicious packages were quickly removed and the attacker’s account was suspended. The story sparked a new wave of discussion in the development community on possible steps to make the development and maintenance of open-source projects more sustainable.

See: https://github.com/Marak/colors.js/issues/285

Ever used colors.js? How about the same in dart?

There is proposal for stdlib, but it will take some time until (if ever) it will reach stage 4.

The working group most in charge of JS is ECMA's TC-39 (TC => Technical Committee) [0]. They've been taking a very deliberate, slow path to expanding the "standard" library because they take a very serious view of backwards compatibility on the web. Some proposals were shifted because of conflicts with ancient versions of things like MooTools still out in the wild, for instance. (This was the so-called "Smooshgate" incident [1].)

This may speed up a bit if the Built-In Modules proposal [2] passes, which would add a deliberate `import` URL for standard modules which would give a cleaner expansion point for new standard libraries over adding more global variables or further expanding the base prototypes (Object.prototype, Array.prototype, etc) in ways that increasingly likely have backwards compatibility issues.

TC-39 works all of their proposals in the open on Github [3] and it can be a fascinating process to watch if you are interested in the language's future direction.

[0] https://tc39.es/

[1] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/03/smooshgate

[2] https://github.com/tc39/proposal-built-in-modules

[3] https://github.com/tc39/proposals

There is a TC39 proposal for a "Javascript Standard Library." It's at stage 1, which is better than stage 0.

https://github.com/tc39/proposal-built-in-modules

The standard library is a tough one. There is a proposal for built-in modules but it is very early days and miles away from what is needed. Clojure ships with functions that make the likes of Lodash and Ramda redundant. I think for a dynamic language an extensive library of functions for manipulating collections is essential. It is a real thing that once dynamic language codebases grow too big, they become a challenge to maintain. Therefore having functions that do a lot of common tasks for you mitigates that issue. Paired with immutability, lots of code just becomes data passing through pipelines, giving less surface area for bugs and making everything more concise and declarative.