For a more in-depth discussion of the differences between Lodash and Underscore, I recommend Ben McCormick's Underscore vs Lo-Dash[2].
And yes, you can pick and choose what modules you want. But you could do that with Mootools and it was released a decade ago. If you want a heavy framework with lots of modules, there are plenty to choose from.
Maybe if it offered a light version on the front page? The file linked from the front page is 372KB. By comparison, the file linked from Underscore's front page is 51KB.
- The actual difference (minified and gzipped) is 17.6 KB vs. 5.7KB.
- Lodash is written modularly so you can import only the methods you actually need.
- In order to "lose some weight" (as Jeremy Ashkenas called it), underscore dropped several methods that people really wanted (including other contributors).
- Also to cut down the size, several major pieces of functionality is not broken in older versions of IE
- Lodash provides a lot more functionality than underscore does, there's a lot of additional utilities including the ones that were dropped last minute by underscore.
There are a lot of other reasons to use lodash, but that was quickly becoming not a _couple_ of things.
Both of which are linked from the front page of their respective websites.
But as I said, this is common in many frameworks. Hell, you can even do with JQuery ( http://projects.jga.me/jquery-builder/ ). So having this ability doesn't make Lodash special.
This is not presented as the preferred method to use the framework on the project page either. You just get a link on the front page to the whole shebang. Probably because most developers just download the whole thing and stick it in.
What I was really hinting at was code complexity. Sometimes having something light and small that you can stick in there without worrying about anything is useful. Lodash can address that by having a light version linked off their front page, but they haven't done that.
On top of everything, Underscore is ribbing them on this very point. See http://underscorejs.org/ and bit down "(3x smaller than Lodash ;)" in bold. Seems like a really easy point to address.
There used to be a compatibility build of lodash, but I think it might've been deprecated by now... In any case, migrating would be fairly straightforward I think.
[2] https://buzzdecafe.github.io/code/2014/05/16/introducing-ram...
Don't know how they compare though.
Good people of HN, this phrase deserves your upvotes.
