# JavaScript's dependency ecosystem needs stronger supply-chain security and package management

DevFeed: [JavaScript's dependency ecosystem needs stronger supply-chain security and package management](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/a-better-future-for-javascript-that-won-t-happen-20789.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://drewdevault.com/blog/An-impossible-future-for-JS/>)

Author: September

Published: 2025-09-17T00:00:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Drew DeVault](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/drew-devault.md>)

Topics: [JavaScript](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/javascript.md>), [Package Management](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/package-management.md>), [npm](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/npm.md>), [Linux](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/linux.md>)

Tags: [dependency-management](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/dependency-management.md>), [javascript](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/javascript.md>), [linux](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/linux.md>), [npm](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/npm.md>), [reproducible-builds](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/reproducible-builds.md>), [supply-chain](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/supply-chain.md>)

## AI overview

This opinion article argues that JavaScript's dependency ecosystem should respond to supply-chain attacks by reducing sprawling dependency trees and adopting stronger trust, package-signing, distribution, and reproducible-build practices. It also proposes a standard library and more consolidated packages.

## Source excerpt

In the wake of the largest supply-chain attack in history, the JavaScript community could have a moment of reckoning and decide: never again. As the panic and shame subsides, after compromised developers finish re-provisioning their workstations and rotating their keys, the ecosystem might re-orient itself towards solving the fundamental flaws that allowed this to happen. After all, people have been sounding the alarm for years that this approach to dependency management is reckless and dangerous and broken by design. Maybe this is the moment when the JavaScript ecosystem begins to understand the importance and urgency of this problem, and begins its course correction. It could leave behind its sprawling dependency trees full of micro-libraries, establish software distribution based on relationships of trust, and incorporate the decades of research and innovation established by more serious dependency management systems. Perhaps Google and Mozilla, leaders in JavaScript standards and implementations, will start developing a real standard library for JavaScript, which makes micro-dependencies like left-pad a thing of the past. This could be combined with a consolidation of efforts, merging micro-libraries into larger packages with a more coherent and holistic scope and purpose, which prune their own dependency trees in turn. This could be the moment where npm comes to terms with its broken design, and with a well-funded effort (recall that, ultimately, npm is GitHub is Microsoft, market cap $3 trillion USD), will develop and roll out the next generation of package management for JavaScript. It could incorporate the practices developed and proven in Linux distributions, which rarely suffer from these sorts of attacks, by de-coupling development from packaging and distribution, establishing package maintainers who assemble and distribute curated collections of software libraries. By introducing universal signatures for packages of executable code, smaller channels and