it would be great to have an https://alternativeto.net/ style recommendation engine integrated into crates.io (or npm) that can narrow down the minimal crate required for a specific use case.
It's an interesting idea, but would take a fair bit of creativity to execute well I think. It's really hard to enumerate this grey area! But I think something that elaborates on this grey area with lots of examples would be great. Sounds like a blog post I should write. :)
> It's an interesting idea, but would take a fair bit of creativity to execute well I think.
yeah for sure, it's a hard problem. but at least a high level listing of similar libraries in the same category with # of recursive deps and total bloat size clearly visible so it was easy to shop around and sort by whatever attribute the developer wants to prioritize.
it would be similar to category-specific filters & comparison tables for features of e.g. SLR cameras, usb3 power supplies on amazon.
The problem is that walkdir isn't really an alternative to globwalk. It's only a good alternative in this specific simple case. globwalk even depends on walkdir. :)
i don't see a problem with listing both, as long as the high-level featureset is sufficiently enumerated in a comparison table for me to quickly discard or add the lib to my to-try list.
There's no problem in listing both. The point is that a high level feature list comparison wouldn't have necessarily helped here.
Having lists of alternative libraries to solve a particular problem is great. It is valuable on its own. But it doesn't really fix the nuance that I'm focusing on here in this example. And my general claim is that this sort of nuance is a fairly common problem that leads to unnecessary dependencies.
What about a less ambitious goal: fuzzy keyword search that displays the dependency graph and cumulative build time of each node in the package graph (activity stats on hover)? Users can assess for themselves whether a simpler library meets their needs, but this would make the relevant information more accessible.
