Please reconsidering your choice of libraries
Issue #105
Are you willing to take vaccines you don’t know about?
I like open source. I ‘ve made some and contributed to some. I also use other people ‘s open source libraries and learn a lot from them 😇
Open source can help us build better, faster and maybe more performant software by basing on other people ‘s hard work. We can also collaborate and make it better. But it’s also a double edges sword if you’re not judging carefully.
Putting a little bit more dedication
You can skip this post if your project is just for fun, and you don’t care about future maintenance. If you’re making client or product projects, you should care and put a little more dedication into it. The company and your teammates trust you to do the good work.
I’ve admitted that I ‘ve done node.js and electron.js. The choice is because it’s just a utility that I want to make quickly, and there ‘s many node.js packages that I can use immediately. I have little experience in node.js, so I accept the risk do get the work done. But if you’re experienced developer in your platform, and it’s your important project, then it’s a different story 💥
I’m kind of experimental person, so I always want to try new things. But I also learn the hard way to not over engineer, and to live as close to the system as possible. I just read Much ado about iOS app architecture and I agree with most of the points, that we shouldn’t fight the SDK and replace system frameworks.
To me, using 3rd libraries is like giving your life to someone else ‘s hands, that you can’t make any decision for your future. Please don’t just pod install and consider it done 🙏
What about the stars
People tend to follow those that have lots of followers, and to star a project with lots of stars. Don’t trust the stars. It means nearly nothing. The star is just the result of some marketing effort. Being featured or not in a newsletter can make 1k stars difference. Just because it was featured in a newsletter does not necessarily mean that it is good 😬
You should judge it yourself by checking how good the source code is, how many documentation are available, and whether there is unit tests or not. The author is just human, so he can’t help maintain the library forever. You’re taking a big risk if you don’t have good picture of the library.
The system, especially iOS, changes very often. There are some libraries that try to “replicate” system APIs or perform type checking for every possible types. It can be that the author pick the most common use cases, or just trying to provide a cleaner APIs to the user. But if things change, will that author be willing to fix that? Will you be stuck there and making another issue asking for help? We’re making life better, not traps for everyone to fall into 🙀
Here I don’t try to blame anyone, “you is not your work”. I just say that you should check it more thoroughly. You can consult your colleagues and discuss if it’s good to integrate. Most of the time, pulling a huge library just for some tiny syntactic sugar does not worth it
I just put some random links here and you can determine if you like or not
- https://github.com/radex/SwiftyUserDefaults/blob/master/Sources/SwiftyUserDefaults.swift#L145
- https://github.com/jiecao-fm/SwiftTheme/blob/master/Source/UIKit%2BTheme.swift#L183
- https://github.com/erichoracek/Motif/blob/7ec2dfce45cd93cb5ae22f4f512a41a499138fd5/Examples/ButtonsExample/ThemeThemeSymbols.m#L10
- https://github.com/vhesener/Closures/blob/master/Xcode/Closures/Source/UITableView.swift#L251
- https://github.com/Draveness/DKNightVersion/blob/master/DKNightVersion/UIKit/UITableView%2BNight.m#L29
- https://github.com/tombenner/nui/blob/master/NUI/Core/NUISwizzler.m#L15
- https://github.com/square/SuperDelegate/blob/master/Sources/SuperDelegate%2BLocalNotifications.swift#L53
- https://github.com/orta/ARAnalytics/blob/master/ARDSL.m#L113
- https://github.com/SnapKit/SnapKit/blob/develop/Source/ConstraintMakerRelatable.swift#L43
- https://github.com/saoudrizwan/DynamicJSON/blob/master/Sources/DynamicJSON.swift#L54
Please
Would you take a very big risk for so little return ? Always implement and imagine that you will be the next maintainer for the project, then you will act differently.
So the next time, please reconsider your choice of libraries. Take 1 step back and analyse a bit ❤️