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NPM 5 - Hopes for the future

I’m not a big fan of NPM, it’s not persé the fault of the tool itself but you don’t get happy when you end up with 1000’s of packages and any package change has a ripple effect through your code base. It even gets better when package creators don’t follow the semantic versioning rules and breaking changes appear without a warning. Everything I have to open up a new codebased and NPM starts its magic behind the scenes, it is not without fear that I first start compiling my code.

Sidenote: You can say similar things about any other packaging tool I guess, e.g. NuGet

But hey, enough complaining, time for some good news. Last month, the NPM released version 5 and they promised a lot of improvements.

The announcement:

Starting today, typing `npm install npm@latest -g` will update you to npm version 5.0.1.
npm@5 is all new and packed with performance, reliability, and usability improvements we know you’ll love. These include a new approach to lockfiles, more robust caching, and incredible speed — for many common tasks, npm@5 is up to 5x faster than previous versions.
The update is available now and we recommend it for everyone.
You can learn more about npm@5 here.

Did the update and it is certainly faster! Made my day…

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