Underscore dependency

[jgillich]

This issue is not really specific to ampersand-router, but I it seems there is no general place to discuss things that cover multiple ampersand modules.

The thing is, underscore is awesome, I use and love it, but it is also a pretty big dependency that doesn't seem appropriate for a collection-of-tiny-modules type framework. Also, unlike Backbone, you can't easily replace underscore with alternatives like lodash.

There was already a mention in #1 that it is planned to remove the underscore dependency in the router, but it makes sense only if it is removed in other modules as well in my opinion.

As a replacement, I would suggest taking underscore and splitting its functions in separate files, probably removing a few that are provided by the most browsers already (like bind, map etc). So instead of doing this:

var _ = require('underscore');
_.extend(...);

you would have to do this:

var extend = require('ampersand-something/extend');
extend(...);

Thoughts?

[kamilogorek]

How about moving to specific lodash modules? Instead of requireing whole underscore, we could just require necessary functions:

var _ = {
    extend: require('lodash.extend'),
    isRegExp: require('lodash.isregexp'),
    isFunction: require('lodash.isfunction'),
    result: require('lodash.result')
};

or

var _extend = require('lodash.extend');
var _isRegExp = require('lodash.isregexp');
var _isFunction = require('lodash.isfunction');
var _result = require('lodash.result');

or even leverage something like https://github.com/lukekarrys/lodash-replacer.

[jgillich]

The advantage of a single module is that it is easier to install; Browserify does only include the used files so the the end result should be the same.

lodash-replacer looks interesting, but since it requires some effort to configure, most users probably won't use it and end up with the full underscore in their apps.

[jgillich]

lodash-cli looks really interesting, it can be used to generate a modular lodash build that puts each function in its own file and supports CommonJS.

[wraithgar]

We will be tracking the removal of underscore here https://github.com/AmpersandJS/ampersand/issues/36