Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published

People really need to start thinking twice when adding a new dependency. So many supply chain attacks this year.

This week, I needed to add a progress bar with 8 stats counters to my Go project. I looked at the libraries, and they all had 3000+ lines of code. I asked LLM to write me a simple progress report tracking UI, and it was less than 150 lines. It works as expected, no dependencies needed. It's extremely simple, and everyone can understand the code. It just clears the terminal output and redraws it every second. It is also thread-safe. Took me 25 minutes to integrate it and review the code.

If you don't need a complex stats counter, a simple progress bar is like 30 lines of code as well.

This is a way to go for me now when considering another dependency. We don't have the resources to audit every package update.

> People really need to start thinking twice when adding a new dependency. So many supply chain attacks this year.

I was really nervous when "language package managers" started to catch on. I work in the systems programming world, not the web world, so for the past decade, I looked from a distance at stuff like pip and npm and whatever with kind of a questionable side-eye. But when I did a Rust project and saw how trivially easy it was to pull in dozens of completely un-reviewed dependencies from the Internet with Cargo via a single line in a config file, I knew we were in for a bad time. Sure enough. This is a bad direction, and we need to turn back now. (We won't. There is no such thing as computer security.)

Rust makes me especially nervous due to the possibility of compile-time code execution. So a cargo build invocation is all it could take to own you. In Go there is no such possibility by design.

The same applies to any Makefile, the Python script invoked by CMake or pretty much any other scriptable build system. They are all untrusted scripts you download from the internet and run on your computer. Rust build.rs is not really special in that regard.

Maybe go build doesn't allow this but most other language ecosystems share the same weakness.

Yes but it's the fact that cargo can pull a massive unreviewed dependency tree and then immediately execute code from those dependencies that's the problem. If you have a repo with a Makefile you have the opportunity to review it first at least.