There are a lot of ::Tiny distributions on CPAN that implement the most needed features of whatever (e.g. YAML::Tiny and Module::Build::Tiny) in much smaller and faster to run-time compile modules. It seems that most of the time, accepting the reduced feature set is a good tradeoff for the reduced runtime bloat.

This got me thinking, with how massive CPAN is, containing tons of distributions that implement the same thing in different ways, often resulting in code bloat where Distribution A has dependence B that does Fubar API one way, and Distribution A also has depencency C that doesn't do Fubar API but has a test that needs Dependency D that does Fubar API another way, and so on.

Could we maybe get a "CPAN Tiny" that is a subset of CPAN without all of the massive redundancy bloat? Distributions that go into it can only use Core and/or other "CPAN Tiny" distributions and can not have redundancy. The dependency bloat is major drawback of Perl.

Sometimes to meet one dependency (especially if running tests), well over 20 dependencies with a lot of them having redundant purposes are needed. It's madness. Especially since packagers don't always properly specify runtime dependencies meaning after that big mess is installed, you find you need even more because some dependencies were left out. It's a mess that makes me want to just look for Python solutions.

submitted by /u/AnymooseProphet
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