Stuck on an issue?

Lightrun Answers was designed to reduce the constant googling that comes with debugging 3rd party libraries. It collects links to all the places you might be looking at while hunting down a tough bug.

And, if you’re still stuck at the end, we’re happy to hop on a call to see how we can help out.

Suggestion: make AVA smaller on disk

See original GitHub issue

Description

I saw that Why AVA says “Minimal and fast”. So I wanted to see how minimal it is. It turns out AVA is 23 MB. Is all of that necessary and truly minimal?

Steps to reproduce

The latest version of AVA reports 23 MB

mkdir ava-example
cd ava-example
npm init -y
npm install --save-dev ava
du -sh

Another minimal test framework, Tape, reports 2.4 MB, about 10x smaller.

mkdir tape-example
cd tape-example
npm init -y
npm install --save-dev tape
npm install --save-dev @types/tape
du -sh

And I made sure to include TypeScript definitions so it was fair comparison.

Environment

Node.js v9.1.0 win32 10.0.16299

Issue Analytics

State:
Created 6 years ago
Comments:6 (4 by maintainers)

Top GitHub Comments

3reactions

sindresorhuscommented, Dec 27, 2017

“Minimal and fast” refers to the API. The main offender in our dependency tree is Babel, and it’s hard to do anything about that. Maybe Babel 7 will improve the situation. We’ll see when it’s out.

We’ve done everything we possibly can to keep the size down. You could help out by making sure none of our dependencies include unnecessary files, and if they do, submit PRs to use the "files" property in package.json.

2reactions

sindresorhuscommented, Dec 27, 2017

chokidar, used for our watch mode, also takes up 8 MB.

Without Babel, Chokidar, and Emcore (For power-assert), AVA would only take up 5 MB, and I’m confident I could reduce it to 4 MB.

But in the end, making a great developer experience is more important than some megabytes. Although I truly wish we could reduce it more.