Project idea: Yarn backed by Arbiter

[paulyoung]

Yesterday, Facebook announced a new package manager for JavaScript called Yarn.

Yarn is a collaboration between Facebook, Exponent, Google, and Tilde.

It's early days but once the Node bindings (and underlying core lib) are more mature it could be worth trying this.

[jspahrsummers]

I talked to a couple of people about this when both projects were in earlier stages, mostly to avoid solving the same problem.

My personal current take is, it's an interesting proposition for Arbiter, but I'm not sure what the upside would be for Yarn. It already works—quite well, from the looks of it—and may have different development constraints (e.g., compatibility with npm) than we do.

[paulyoung]

I wasn't expecting it would be a change that would be taken lightly but thought maybe the idea of using a tried and tested set of core functionality might be appealing over writing and maintaining it in Yarn.

Other potential benefits could be related to performance and reliability as Arbiter is improved and addresses edge cases found as a result of usage in other languages/ecosystems through bindings.