I like the ideas, but it feels like it's just a small incremental step over established solutions like webpack and browserify.
Does this have any more to offer other than deducting what to download&install from the dependency tree? Because if that's "all", it would be easily added to e.g. webpack, I suppose. Is it really worth making yet another dependency and build tool just for that one feature? If you build on top of webpack, you get a lot of stuff for free, like speedy and dependable file watching, hot-reloading development servers, support for nearly any imagineable frontend language, and a remarkably decent extensible architecture. All this has to be made again for Duo.
Both dependency management and frontend building are highly complex tasks. I'm not saying that therefore it couldn't be done better, but I do honestly, without judging, wonder whether the authors seriously considered existing solutions and ran into impossible problems, or whether this is just the Not Invented Here syndrome at work.
Does this have any more to offer other than deducting what to download&install from the dependency tree? Because if that's "all", it would be easily added to e.g. webpack, I suppose. Is it really worth making yet another dependency and build tool just for that one feature? If you build on top of webpack, you get a lot of stuff for free, like speedy and dependable file watching, hot-reloading development servers, support for nearly any imagineable frontend language, and a remarkably decent extensible architecture. All this has to be made again for Duo.
Both dependency management and frontend building are highly complex tasks. I'm not saying that therefore it couldn't be done better, but I do honestly, without judging, wonder whether the authors seriously considered existing solutions and ran into impossible problems, or whether this is just the Not Invented Here syndrome at work.