> Zopfli is written in C, which presents challenges. Unless it was added to Node core, the CLI would need to (1) rewrite Zopfli in JS, possibly impacting performance (2) rely on a native module, impacting reliability (3) rely on a WebAssembly module. All of these options add complexity.
Wow! Who's going to tell them that V8 is written in C++? :)
It's not about C per-se, as much as each native compiled dependency creates additional maintenance concerns. Changes to hardware/OS can require a recompile or even fixes. NPM build system already requires a JavaScript runtime, so is already handled as part of existing maintenance. The point is that Zopfli either needs to be rewritten for a platform-agnostic abstraction they already support, or else Zopfli will be added to a list of native modules to maintain.
> It's not about C per-se, as much as each native compiled dependency creates additional maintenance concerns. Changes to hardware/OS can require a recompile or even fixes.
This is a canard. zopfli is written in portable C and is far more portable than the nodejs runtime. On any hardware/OS combo that one can build the nodejs runtime, they certainly can also build and run zopfli.
> Zopfli is written in C, which presents challenges. Unless it was added to Node core, the CLI would need to (1) rewrite Zopfli in JS, possibly impacting performance (2) rely on a native module, impacting reliability (3) rely on a WebAssembly module. All of these options add complexity.
Wow! Who's going to tell them that V8 is written in C++? :)
[1]: https://github.com/npm/rfcs/pull/595