Moolah Diaries – The Moment Dilemma

moment is one of those javascript libraries that just breaks my heart. It does so much right – nearly every date function you’d want right at your finger tips, no major gotchas causing bugs, clean API and good docs. I’ve used moment in some pretty hard code, very date/time orientated apps and been very happy.

But it breaks my heart because when you pull it in via webpack, it winds up being a giant monolithic blob. I only need a couple of date functions but with moment I wind up getting every possible date function you can imagine plus translations into a huge range of languages I don’t need. If I use moment, about 80% of Moolah’s client javascript is moment.

So I was quite pleased to find date-fns which also provides every date function you can imagine but is specifically design to be modular so you only pull in what you actually need. Works a treat, so Moolah uses that for the date operations it needs and it barely adds any size at all.

Except then when I went to use a graph library, it turns out that Chart.js which I was keen to try depends on moment. Sigh.