e18e (Ecosystem Performance)
June 28, 2024
Today, we are excited to announce e18e!
e18e is a community initiative to bring together people who are passionate about improving performance in the JavaScript ecosystem. Our goal is to provide a space for knowledge sharing, contributions and ideas.
Our focus is on three main areas:
- cleanup - reducing, simplifying and modernizing dependency trees.
- speedup - speeding up core packages and frameworks.
- levelup - providing modern, lighter alternatives to core packages.
Clean up
Over time, many of us build up deeply nested trees of dependencies and lose sight of what we actually depend on. This often results in us relying on packages which are no longer maintained, or are slow, or bloated, etc.
Often there are already actively maintained, battle tested alternatives but maintainers are unaware or do not have the time to move to them.
There are several efforts to help these maintainers out by replacing or updating such dependencies:
- The ecosystem cleanup project.
- The module replacements project.
- The eslint-plugin-depend plugin.
Speed up
Many of the core packages we depend on could benefit from performance improvements. Given how fundamental some of these packages are, a performance gain could widely affect the ecosystem in a positive way.
Some examples of these performance optimizations:
- Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem
- Astro build performance
- Typescript package size optimizations and Jake's blog in similar efforts
Level up
Many well established packages have grown over time to fit more and more features, configurability and so on. Sometimes, we have use cases where this is too much for what we need, and would rather go back to the core functionality.
In those situations, the community has recently been building more lighter alternatives - packages which often come in with zero dependencies and very small install/bundle sizes.
Just a few of great options to common libraries:
Get involved!
e18e is a place to help us all connect and collaborate. If you're interested in joining some of the different efforts from folks in the community, or just want to check out what's going on - Join the e18e discord!