Daniel Stenberg's curl, Mark Adler's zlib and perhaps Bram Moolenaar's vim come to mind, AFAIK those are mostly one man shows. Do you have other perhaps better examples?
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2021
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alsa-lib or crypto++ maybe? Not technically one person, but a majority of it is.
Maybe a bit pedantic, but I don't think Vim really applies since it's not a lib.
Very close to home since it's what Lemmy uses: Actix. And we almost lost the head dev at one point, too.
Guy maintaining GPG email tools is another good example.
Such powerful code/tool yet such sad story of its created and maintainer. Couldnt any Foss foundation help them?
I think there might've been some community funding after the story, but I haven't followed up in a while.
cough Leftpad cough
I'm still amazed that NPM allowed people to just remove packages from the repo.
I'm still amazed that NPM bent over backwards just to please the (extremely sleazy) Kik app and willingly screwed over one of their best package contributors.
Oh wait, no I'm not!
NPM is basically hot garbage
And now that it's owned by Microshaft, it's a raging dumpster fire that's apart of the broader landfill fire.
Honestly, between NPM owned by MS and Yarn owned by Facebook, JavaScript straight up has no good package manager option.
It's really not a great situation with package management in Js land, and having two predatory companies own major tools and package repositories certainly doesn't help things.
All the more reason to not use JS. Being a terrible language is one thing, having a terrible ecosystem is worse.
Definitely, it's sadly hard to avoid entirely with it being the main driver for the web. Stuff like ClojureScript is nice since it's pretty much its own ecosystem and you can opt into Js stuff if you really need to.
Kotlin can also compile into JS and is more familiar to most JS developers. More options are good as a general rule and we're starting to see more players in this space.
You know it's bad when you're using a lower level bytecode or native language to compile to a high level interpreted language just to avoid said high level language.
Yeah, it's kind of an amusing situation. I literally just treat Js as bytecode nowadays. I haven't had to write a line of it in years.
Honestly, production JS is so obfuscated and processed and hard to read as an outsider that it's essentially bytecode. Reverse engineering JS in a webpage is a common security CTF challenge.
haha totally
Probably Php too
Basically https://github.com/zloirock/core-js runs the majority of the web, yet no one gives a shit about the single person that maintains the library for free, and is also stuck in Russia. Guy is perhaps the most experienced JavaScript developer alive, ensuring that you can use new features consistently across all browsers. The library requires constant maintenance, so dependents such as babel.js, who rely on core-js for core functionality, are dead when he decides to drop it. TC39 ignores him, even though people from babel get a say, even though babel is essentially a fancy wrapper around core-js. Being a maintainer truly is a thankless job.