Tackling issues with the venerable NPM JavaScript package manager, Facebook is open-sourcing its Yarn package manager.

Developed in collaboration with engineers from Google, Tilde, and Exponent, Yarn can be used with every major JavaScript framework; thus, every JavaScript engineer who relies on shared dependencies in the ecosystem can pull code faster. Developers using Yarn can install packages significantly faster than with NPM and manage dependencies consistently across machines or in secure offline environments. 

“We’ve used the NPM client successfully at Facebook for years, but as the size of our code base and the number of engineers grew, we ran into problems with consistency, security, and performance,” Facebook engineers Sebastian McKenzie, Christoph Pojer, and James Kyle said in a jointly authored statement. “After trying to solve for each issue as it came up, we set out to build a new solution to help us manage our dependencies more reliably.”

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here