moq VS NSubstitute

Moq’s prior version, 4.18.4, free of the exfiltration behavior, accounts for 6,765,006 downloads in the past six weeks, demonstrating the potential blast radius of privacy breach if a developer hadn’t noticed the issue and raised it with the community.

In light of the Moq issue yesterday[0] I'm interested to understand why the consensus seems to be so in favor of keeping packages up-to-date in software.

The common explanation I see is it "keeps you up to date with security and bug fixes".

But in practice this seems to just involve most orgs mandating Dependabot and mindlessly updating every dependency when a new version becomes available. (Yes in an ideal world you code review every change in every dependency, but... I mean, let's be real here. Just take the update frequency of the AWS SDK packages in isolation, very few orgs are actually doing this)

As a maintainer of an open source library I know most releases are a crapshoot, they're just as likely to contain new bugs and flaws as they are to fix old ones.

So staying up-to-date seems to open up codebases to far greater risks than outdated dependencies:

1) Zero days, a new package launches with some critical security flaw that isn't going to get noticed for some time.

2) Supply chain attacks, old packages are generally immutable. Therefore most supply chains attacks seem to involve take-overs of existing package (name)s by disgruntled or new hostile 'maintainers'. The new versions are far more at risk.

3) New bugs, the dirty truth of OSS is most work is done by unpaid people with little time or ability to focus. Most software isn't formally verified. New updates are a risk.

In addition the old version is a known quantity. Unless you know absolutely the version you are running is compromised (log4j, OpenSSL) what benefits does updating actually bring? The default presumption that version number goes up is better seems like yet more security/compliance cargo cult behavior.

What am I missing here?

[0] https://github.com/moq/moq/issues/1374

NSubstitute is good, I used it at a previous job.

I've favored Moq in the past because I think there are a couple of things it makes a bit easier or is a bit less opinionated about, but NSub is perfectly cromulent as well.

Someone posted a quick guide to migrating a bunch of it easily in one of the issues in the Moq repo discussing this whole mess: https://github.com/moq/moq/issues/1374#issuecomment-16712411...

Moq was is a popular .NET mocking library that has accumulated over 475.7 million downloads as of now.

Going by reports in the releated Github issue Moq does not let users opt out of this privacy-invading data collection: https://github.com/moq/moq/issues/1372

This is sad. Moq was my favorite mocking framework in .net. I will not be using it moving forward and if I had any projects using it I'd rip it out ASAP.

a. you might do so purely out of argo cult, i.e. because someone told you this was the right thing to do™, and that's a silly exercise. b. you could also be doing this for a good reason: to use the interface with a mocking tool like NSubstitute

When comparing it to one of its most well-known alternatives, NSubstitute, which has "only" reached 85.6 million downloads, it is fair to say that Moq is the most widely used mocking library in the .NET ecosystem.

Maintainer rejected the PR. They have temporarily disabled the integration in https://github.com/moq/moq/pull/1375 but kept the SponsorLink project reference in the source code. It seems like their intent is to re-enable the integration at a later point :(

NSubstitute [0] might be an alternative. Or to fork Moq pre-4.20.

[0] https://nsubstitute.github.io/

In terms of mocking there are several frameworks you can use, but I've mainly relied on Moq and NSubstitute. Within this demo, I'm going to use NSubstitute as I've found it a little easier to use.

it will change the URL from https://github.com/nsubstitute/NSubstitute to https://github.dev/nsubstitute/NSubstitute (or you can just nav there yourself).

NSubstitute

🔗 NSubstitute documentation | NSubstitute

If you use NSubstitute (the best mocking .NET framework), then you have to install this small yet useful plugin right now. It kindly generates mocks and Arg.Is / Arg.Any.

Another nice mocking framework is NSubstitute https://nsubstitute.github.io/